Well, whaddaya know 'bout that...

So I had to go to Sears today to get a new battery ("bat'try" to Mike - by the way, I do still have the "bat'try" - it's in my classroom, but it has a hole and I haven't found it yet. Hmm...I'm guessing everybody else has no freaking clue what I'm talking about...bother Mike about it at the above link...just send him comment after comment that says "Missa Man-no, tell us 'bout the BAT'TRY!!")

Whew...enough digression...

Okay, so I was at Sears buying a CAR battery today, and, having some time to kill, I wandered into the mall. I stopped in at Hot Topic, because, if you 30+ year-old readers haven't realized, the 80's are totally hip again, and I wanted to see how many reproductions of concert t-shirts I own the original of were being sold to the youth of today. (Turns out none - yet. A-ha and The Alarm will have their time at the cultural revival table, just you wait!)

While there, I did see a shirt with the logo of the seminal New York nightclub CBGB on it. CBGB is considered by many to be the birthplace of punk and new wave music in the late 1970s - bands like the Ramones, Talking Heads and Blondie all played their first shows there.

Anyway, if you go to the link, you'll see that the marquee says "CBGB" on top, and the letters "OMFUG" underneath. As long as I've been aware of this place (going on twenty years, I'd reckon), I'd never known what all those initials meant. I can recall trying to piece something together once or twice, usually ending up with something nasty (especially for the "OMFUG" part. Go ahead, see what your mind comes up with. Only don't repeat it here - this is a family website).

Anyway, fifteen seconds on Google, and I had the answer.

Turns out the club owner, a guy named Hilly Kristal, opened it up in the mid-seventies, after the Woodstock wave but before punk had broken. He called his bar CBGB for "Country Blue Grass Bar."

Huh.

Never thought of the words "country" nor "bluegrass" while listening to "Blitzkrieg Bop."

"OMFUG" stands for "Other Music For Uplifting Gourmandizers." Whatever that means.

So, there you go. Mystery solved.