Go Nuts

Post date: Aug 03, 2016 9:16:48 PM

Film festival is on in Wellington and we hadn't managed to get to anything until last night. Went to a movie called Nuts - based on the life of a person the Guardian refers to as a "great historical footnote" John Romulus Brinkley.

Movie is a mixture of clever animation, some interviews with historians and some of Brinkley's home movies - he was a man with high self esteem it would appear.

Dr Brinkley set up a practice in a small Kansas town and an early patient was looking for a cure for impotence. Looking out of the window the patient saw goats copulating in the paddock and wished he has "some of those goat's nuts" No sooner wished than it happened. After 16 years of nothing nine months after the nut transplant the patient had a son (called him Billy)

Review of movie is here

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jan/23/nuts-review-animated-documentary-john-romulus-brinkley-goat-testicles

The biography of the man is an incredible tale. Movie was done well and if you have the opportunity to see it - online or in movie theatre you would all enjoy it I think.

Apparently Wolfman Jack took over the Mexican radio tower - and thus JR Brinkley is responsible for the birth of rock'n'roll radio.

because we are talking about the late 1920s and early 1930s radio was very new. Brinkley was a radio pioneer - his first station KFKB (Kansas Family Knows Best) - which gained enormous following including for his own advice programmes.

The second radio station he set up was in mexico (when he lost his broadcasting license in USA he worked out that he could live in Texas, create the programmes there and broadcast out of mexico with a large enough transmitting tower that "you could hear the radio through the fillings in your teeth"