A Cultural Treasury

Sometimes while surfing the net, looking for useful things, one serendipidously finds something completely useless that was long looked-for, but never found.

On a plain, unadorned site with the cryptic name SCBD, there's not one, nor two, nor even three such, but more.

First, the Top of the Flops : lyrics of the very worst songs of recent times, for example, the Chicken Song:

Hold a chicken in the air, stick a deckchair up your nose,
Buy a jumbo jet and then bury all your clothes,
Paint your left knee green, then extract your wisdom teeth,
Form a string quartet and pretend your name is Keith.

Skin yourself alive, learn to speak Arapaho,
Climb inside a dog and behead an Eskimo,
Eat a Renault 4, wear salami in your ears,
Casserole your gran, disembowel yourself with spears

Ah, they don't make songs like that any more. For which we can all be grateful. There's also old perennials like "It Was An Itsy-Bitsy Teeny-Weeny Yellow Polka-Dot Bikini" and modern Classics like "Green Grow My Nadgers Oh". And my favourite of all time, "Right Said Fred", whose lyrics I've been chasing since I first heard it in the early 60's.

Then there's the Stanley Unwin transcripts. Now who is Stanley Unwin, you may well ask. I didn't know either till I saw this site. But you may recognise his work, as I did:

...There was a great suffery. Not only this: the larder, foodage, all the fine things of the world was not enjoying by the peopload themselves on account of these rats doing a sniffy most (and the chew-chew and stuffle down their ratty grebes); because these were the fattest raps and also over-producey in this great lovely city which was otherwise... tsk tsk.

Then there's the Prisoner Transcripts.

Prisoner: I am not a number, I am a person.
Number 2: Six of one, a half a dozen of another!

And then there's a serious but eminently readable guide to the Greek Alphabet.

This is an intellectual smorgasbord, condimented with comedy, but salted with the surreal, sinister and serious.