A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse – Part 1

Back in 2010 I made a series of posts from the start of December through to the 24th called “A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse”. It was based on some background work I did for a series of Christmas cards I did donkey’s years ago. Since a lot of regular visitors have turned up on Retrorambling since then, here’s a quick reprise on the series – Ted

We have a strange lingual phenomena in Norway and that is that the fat sod you English speaking people call Santa we call a “nisse” and that would have posted no problem if it wasn’t for the fact that we already had a”nisse” long before St Nicolas started giving presents to poor children somewhere in Germany. It is all a linguistic mishap really, it is because the Swedes called Santa "Nisse" which is a nickname for Niklas and we here in Norway adopted it. The real nisse don’t like this at all. So in order to put things into prospective, I’m going to use December on this blog to let you all take part in my only scientific study “A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse”.

The Norwegian "Nisse" is a relative of the Brownie, the Pixie and the Leprechaun. He lives in rural districts and in the woods. In Norway we call Santa Clause "nisse" as well, but that fat, jolly, "Ho Ho" chanting lunatic that Coca Cola and other companies that think they have a claim on Christmas love so much must never ever be mistaken for the original. The original "Nisse" has been around for as long as there has been people here in Norway, and he is here all year round.

In the old days people believed that the "nisse" took care of their houses and animals and kept them out of harms way. In rural districts people used to put out porridge for the "nisse", a tradition that is still upheld round Christmas at many farms around the country. The "nisse" could be quite a prankster, so keeping him happy was important. It is a well known fact that if he didn’t get his porridge, he could hide things or rearrange whole rooms or even worse.

In our day and age, the "nisse" has become very shy, as all the products of the silly thing we call progress scares him. Very few people has seen a "nisse" these last hundred years, so as I am one of the few fortunate, I will share my knowledge with you. In "A Study of the Norwegian Nisse" you will meet two, they both live in the woods close to my cottage in Enebakk, some five metric miles from Oslo city. They have never been willing to divulge their names so in lack of better names, I’ve called them Prototype No 1 and Prototype No 2, No 1 and No 2 for short.

All my knowledge stems from these two individuals, so this study may not give a general picture of the "nisse" as such at all. They are after all great pranksters. Pulling your leg is among their favourite past times, so if the picture I’m painting here seems to vary from your opinion of what a "nisse" is and should be, what can I say.

A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 2
A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 3
A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 4
A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 5
A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 6
A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 7
A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 8
A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 9
A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 10
A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 11
A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 12
A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 13
A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 14
A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 15
A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 16
A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 17
A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 18
A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 19
A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 20
A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 21
A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 22
A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 23
A Study Of The Norwegian Nisse–Part 24

A Practical Kid

A notice from Monroe City Democrat, December 13, 1900

It’s obvious that what would happen to good old Santa if he should slip on the icy roof was of no concern to pretty Mary Mudd as long as the doll came whole down the chimney – Ted 😉

Notice found at questionableadvice

Jutka Goz – Hungarian Actress, Dancer & Singer

Picture text: Hungary is famous for its paprika, revolution and beautiful women, a state of affairs that has earned for its inhabitants the enviable reputation for being hot-blooded. And Jutka Goz, the peppery Hungarian miss pictured here, does little to refute that allegation.

Jutka easily captured the coveted Miss Hungary title in 1960 and represented her native land in the Miss Universe Contest held in that year in L. A. Surprisingly enough she did not win, but what she saw in the states convinced her that the low life of “Decadent capitalism” was preferable to the high jinks of the “People’s Paradise”. Needless to say, the red bosses back in Budapest took a dim view of her attitude. It was for the wild Gobors to leave – they might make Hungarian goulash out of capitalism and drive it into bankruptcy  – but a self-supporting, busty beauty like Jutka was a dear of another hair colour

A team of fast-talking Peter Lorre types was dispatched to “persuade” the mummify Magyar miss to return to the socialistic fatherland. They tried everything but nothing worked.

Picture text: Travelling Hungarian – Commuting these days between London and Hollywood is Hungarian dancer, singer and actress Jutka Goz. But then, Jutka is a girl a girl who likes to keep moving and has done since she left Budapest in 1960. She works in cabaret in London and on the Continent but lately has set her sights on television. Jutka recently returnes from Hollywood where she took part in a “Wagon Trail” story.

Image text: If London seems a littkle quieter these days it must be because Hungarian dancer and singer Jutka Goz has gone to New York. Cabaret Connoisseurs will miss this 36-21-36 bundle of energy.

This Week’s Softdrink – Stoney Ginger Beer

Stoney Ginger Beer, or Stoney Tangawizi (Tangawisi) as it is called in Swahili speaking Africa, is a ginger beer sold in several countries on the African continent. The product, sold in a brown bottle or can, is made and distributed by The Coca-Cola Company.

As is common with ginger beers in comparison to the lighter ginger ales, the ginger flavor present in Stoney is especially intense. There are several varieties of Stoney in different parts of Africa. Although they are all bottled by Coca-Cola their recipes vary. The versions in Southern Africa tend to be more carbonated and sweeter while the East Africa version tends to have a much stronger ginger bite. Stoney Ginger Beer was introduced in South Africa in 1971.

 

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Help Needed
I need your help visitors, both in suggesting sodas and soft drinks from around the world and in giving your opinion on the ones presented if you know the product. And you can start with giving your opinion on the ones posted already or reading what other visitors have written  – Ted

List of Soft drinks and sodas posted already
Visitors soft drinks and sodas suggestions and comments

M Y Stella Polaris

The most famous cruise ship of the thirties, the inter war years, and probably in the history of cruising is the Stella Polaris.

The ship was considered one of the most elegant and exclusive devoted to cruising.  She sailed to the Mediterranean, North Cape, Caribbean and Around The World.  She had no rivals. On the World Cruise there was more than one crew member for every passenger.

She was owned by Bergen Line from Norway during the first part of her career, and resembled a royal yacht, with her clipper bow, bow sprit, well deck and lavish accommodations for just 200 passengers. She was built by Götaverken in Göteborg in 1925-26, measured 5.020 GRT and went into service in early 1927.

Passengers. M Y Stella Polaris North Cape Cruise 1932.

Lunch is served.

Sitting room, suite de luxe.

Bedroom, suite de luxe.

New Map’s Solyto

The Solyto was first manufactured in France by New Map in the early 1950’s.  The Solyto was powered by a Lyon 125cc 2-stroke engine that had 3 speeds and no reverse. The body was made from steel and came in a soft top van version and also with a “camper” style body that featured both a steel top at the back and a canvas top at the front.  Production ceased in 1963.

Tempo Comfort – Norwegian Produced Moped

Comfort 1957-1958, 49cc Sachs, 2-stroke single: This moped went into production with a Sachs engine having two or three hand operated gears. There was also a similar model called the Swing that had a special “swing fork” and also fan cooling; which was made until 1960.

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The very first motorised thing I ever rode was a slightly older version of the moped  on this image. It was grey, had two hand operated gears and you started it by pedalling away like you rode a bicycle. I was 8, and my love of anything motorized was born – Ted

Victorian Inventions – Part 14

From “Victorian Inventions” by Leonard De Vries published by American Heritage Press in 1972

Dr W. O. Ayres of New Haven in the United States of America has designed a new flying machine so Utopian in conception that serious doubts may well be entertained with regard to its feasibility. Be that as it may, the fact that such a serious publication as the Scientific American has devoted space to this machine in its columns is reason enough for our decision not to deprive our readers of a short discussion of this project.

The propulsive power is derived from compressed air transported in two cylindrical vessels; this air also fills the hollow tubes in the framework of the machine. Compressed to a pressure of 200 atmospheres, the quantity of air conveyed is adequate to drive the machine for several hours.

The Scientific American gives further details: ‘It is possible that the propellers may require to be made larger, but providing the principle is maintained, we consider that a machine such as this can do successfully what is expected of it. In order to afford support for two systems of propellers, one horizontal and one vertical, a table-like frame is required. The dimensions of this are 3 feet by 4 feet while it is supported by four legs 4 feet in height. Quarter-inch-thick steel gives the tubing all the strength needed. The rider, or aeronaut, sits upon a saddle like that of a bicycle, suspended from the top frame by steel wires.

The four horizontal propellers serve to give the craft sufficient lifting-power. They are driven not only by the compressed air but also by the lower limbs of the rider thrusting on pedals of the type employed in bicycles. Attached to each cylinder of compressed air is a driving engine in which a paddle-wheel is brought into rotating motion by the flow of air. With his left hand the rider regulates the valve for the air-supply, while with his right arm he drives the vertically revolving propeller which thrusts the machine forward.’

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“The four horizontal propellers serve to give the craft sufficient lifting-power”. Yeah, right . Those propellers wouldn’t lift a paper bag full of ping-pong balls Dr Ayres  –  Ted

Making Christmas Presents

Each year I make music collections for a lot of my friends for Christmas and I do that by using specific search words in the music folder on my Windows explorer. If what turns up seems a nice collection I burn the tracks on a cd and design covers and backs. For the cd that got the cover above I used the search words “man” – Ted

Search words: “magic”	Search word: “game”
Search word: “hurt”	Search word: “night”
Search word: “sweet”	Search word: “dance”
Search words: “travel”	Search words: “sleep”
Search word: “letter” and “letters”	Search word: “love”
Search words: “Saturday” and “Sunday”	Search words: “hot”, “heat” and “warm”

Cinzia Mambretti – Italian Actress

Cinzia Mambretti is an Italian actress, known for Il tempo degli assassini (1975).

This Week’s Girlymag Article – Renee, The Redhaired Reb

Renee Sessions, the swingy, zingy red haired doll whose fresh-faced personality brightens these pages, might with full justification, be called a "double rebel," or, if not that, perhaps a "reb rebel." In the first place, Renee hails from Mississippi, which is as Deep South as you can get. That qualifies Renee as a rebel, of course. In the second place, she’s a way-out gal who’s in revolt against the conventional kind of behaviour which society’s squares expect of everyone. And that’s what makes this beauty a "double rebel."

Read the whole article and see
the naughty pictures HERE

Warning: Nudity do occur in this article. If you are under age or live in a country where watching images of nude women for some reason  is against the law  I take no responsibility if you click the link above. In other words you’re flying solo from here on – Ted 😉

The Sunday Comic – That Too

What Joy

A fat girlfriend who plays the accordion, I mean what more can a man ask for on Christmas eve – Ted

(I think this might be the right moment to divulge that I hate accordion music. Particularly traditional Norwegian dance music played on that horrible instrument)

Image found on DeadAir

Publicity Still By Bernard Of Hollywood – 1951

That semi-see-through effect always gets to me. It is much more sexy than full  nudity – Ted 😉

Popular Music History 1945 – 1980 – Part 4 – Soul

In one sense, the term ‘soul’ has simply been a convenient label for the record industry to attach to the music that sells to young Afro Americans, replacing earlier tags like ‘race music’ and ‘rhythm & blues’. It has been used in the seventies to refer to an increasingly broad and diverse range of styles. But its entry into widespread usage around 1964 did coincide with a distinct shift of emphasis in the dominant stylistic approach in the Afro Americans field.

Read the whole article HERE

Related articles

• Popular Music History 1945 – 1980 – Part 2 – Folk & Blues (retrorambling.wordpress.com)
• Popular Music History 1945 – 1980 – Part 1 – Rock & Roll (retrorambling.wordpress.com)
• Etta James Songs (mademan.com)
• Underground blues : Original mods Teramo weekender. (retrospectivemodernism.wordpress.com)
• Larry McKinley, legendary radio host, record producer & Jazz Fest fixture, dies at 85 (wwltv.com)

Grand-daddy’s Sauce – Part 13

All posts material: “Sauce” and “Gentleman’s Relish” by Ronnie Barker – Hodder & Stoughton in 1977

Charles H. Bennett

Ronnie Barkers Comment to the drawing: I have included these two pictures from “Character Sketches and Development Drawing” by Charles H. Bennett (c. 1850), simply because I find them so fascinating and so cleverly drawn. Not only does the faithful servant change, step by step, into a faithful watchdog, but the food he was taking to his master changes into his own plate of scraps.

Ronnie Barkers Comment to the drawing: Even more ingenious, this somewhat macabre portrait of a mugger of the time, consulting the turnip.watch of a previous victim, as he waits for his present prey to emerge from some Music Hall or supper~rooms. His origin is quickly traced to a muzzled and dangerous dancing~bear, while the watch becomes his padlock, and his cudgel the very post which holds him captive. This kind of meticulous and detailed drawing is, to me, one of the fascinations of Victorian illustrated humour-satirical or otherwise.

Related articles

• Grand-daddy’s Sauce – Part 6 (retrorambling.wordpress.com)
• Grand-daddy’s Sauce – Part 10 (retrorambling.wordpress.com)
• Grand-daddy’s Sauce – Part 7 (retrorambling.wordpress.com)
• Grand-daddy’s Sauce – Part 11 (retrorambling.wordpress.com)

Amelia’s Last Haircut

Amelia Earhart receives what proved to be her last haircut in 1937.

On July 2, 1937, Amelia Earhart, 39, accompanied by navigator Fred Noonan, tried to reach California after taking off from New Guinea aboard a twin-engine Lockheed Electra. It was the last stage of a world tour going East, at the equator. She had planned to land on the Howland Island to refuel. A few hours after take-off, she announced in a final radio message that she could not locate the island and “fuel running out.” Then nothing. Despite a search, no trace of the aircraft was ever detected.

Image and text found at Another State Of Mind

Related articles

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• Will we ever… discover what happened to Amelia Earhart? (3quarksdaily.com)
• Notable Quotes From Amelia Earhart (womenshistory.answers.com)
• I Was Amelia Earhart by Jane Mendelsohn (womensprizeforfictionbookreview.wordpress.com)
• amelia earhart and radar (tattooartcameo.wordpress.com)

To Wake Up Gay In The Morning

I can’t see why they’re making all that fuzz about gays over in Russia when all they have to do is get Ovaltine off the shelves in the shops. And that shouldn’t be difficult in near autocracy – Ted

This Week’s Favourite Female Singer – Lula Reed

Born Lula Marietta McClelland, 21 March 1921, Minjo Junction, Ohio. Died 21 June 2008, Detroit, Michigan

An attractive singer in whom the seed of soul is particularly strong, Lula Reed belongs to that coterie of stylists who closely followed the lead of Dinah Washington in the early 1950s. Many sounded like little girls – many were little girls – but Lula, like Dinah, clearly wasn’t. Unlike Dinah, her switch from praising the Lord to singing the Devil’s music was more of a wrench for her and it ultimately resulted in Lula turning her back on the limelight and retreating to the welcoming bosom of Christianity.

According to her King press kit, Lula Reed was born in Port Clinton, Ohio, possibly in 1927. She found her voice singing in her local church choir and was taken under the wing of Professor Harold Boggs, who nurtured the young talent. Himself a well-known gospel singer, Boggs began his recording career on King Records in Cincinnati in August 1952, about six months after Lula had made her well-starred debut for the label with Sonny Thompson‘s Orchestra. Her only national hits would prove to be those first two Henry Glover-penned songs recorded as vocalist with Thompson’s band on 14th December 1951: “Let’s Call It A Day” attained the #7 position of the Billboard Rhythm & Blues Chart, while “I’ll Drown in My Tears” surpassed it to stall at #5. The former song was revived by Billy Gayles and Ike Turner in 1956, while the latter – retitled Drown in My Own Tears – was taken to the top of the Billboard R&B chart in early 1956 by Ray Charles on Atlantic, since which time it has been covered dozens of times by artists as diverse as The Righteous Brothers, Dinah Washington, Aretha Franklin, and Blood, Sweat & Tears.

From early 1953, with two big R&B hits under her belt, Reed began enjoying releases under her own name, although the backing band was invariably still Thompson’s. Sadly, despite the commercial promise of her first two releases and being voted the nation’s #4 rhythm and blues singer by The Cash Box trade magazine in 1954, Reed spent six more years with King Records searching in vain for another elusive hit. She and her now husband, Sonny Thompson, took a break from the label from 1958 to 1960, with Reed spending two years with Chess’ Argo subsidiary (during which time, King released her only solo LP “Blue and Moody”), but they returned briefly to the fold in 1961, recording on the Federal label. The following year Reed was teamed up with Freddy King for a handful of duets and the celebrated “Boy Girl Boy” LP on the King label, but by the end of 1962 she had left the company, left Cincinnati and left Thompson to spend a year with the label owned by her early admirer Ray Charles – Tangerine Records.

By late 1963 it was all over: always one of those troubled artists in whom the secular constantly warred with a more dominant spiritual side, Lula Reed quit the world of R&B in the early 1960s to go back home and the church that had uncovered her talent. All efforts to contact her and interview her about her “wicked” recording career have since been rebuffed.

Text by Dave Penny found at Black Cat Rockabilly

Pre-War Classics Of The Road – Part 13

1911 Empire


Known as the ‘Little Aristocrat’, the Empire 20hp car was built in Indianapolis . Like so many American cars, it made use of proprietary components, such as a four-cylinder bi-block GBS engine. Open raceabout bodywork, such as that shown here, was fashionable wear on many American chassis of this period. In 1912, production of Empire cars was shifted from Indianapolis to Greenville, Pennsylvania.

 

1911 Hansa

A real Edwardian ‘boy-racer’, the 7/20hp Hansa Type B had a four cylinder engine with overhead valves, and was capable of some 50mph flat out. An aggressively raked bonnet and flared wings all contributed to the appeal of this model, which was the star attraction of Hansa’s stand at the 1911 Berlin Motor Show. Despite its sporting image, the Hansa won more prizes for styling than for competition success.

 

1911 Rolls-Royce

Like Henry Ford, Henry Royce achieved his greatest fame by adhering to a policy of producing just one model for the span of nineteen years. In Royce’s case, the car was the 40/50hp Rolls-Royce, first announced in 1906. Initially, the 40/50hp (familiarly known as the ‘Silver Ghost’. after the thirteenth car of this type) had a 7036cc, six cylinder engine, but in 1909 the swept volume was raised to 7428cc. This 1911 40/50 has touring coachwork by Barker & Co.

 

1912 Darracq

In 1912, Alexandre Darracq announced that the new models from his factory at Sureness would be fitted with the Henriod ‘valveless’ engine (which in fact had more valve than conventional power units, as a rotating valve shaft, connecting inlet and exhaust passages alternately with a single port per cylinder, was employed). The Henriod engine proved gutless and liable to seize irrevocably; poppet-valve models (bottom right) saved the day.