The really important question (as cartoonist Shannon Wheeler reminds us) remains: what happens to your ideas once you get them?
[Cartoon scanned from April, 2013 issue of The Funny Times; click to enlarge]
Consider the Things We Miss (Then Consider Our Missing Them)
[Image: Where Are You, by user “code1name” at the sxc.hu site]
From whiskey river:
Every life is inexplicable, I kept telling myself. No matter how many facts are told, no matter how many details are given, the essential thing resists telling. To say that so and so was born here and went there, that he did this and did that, that he married this woman and had these children, that he lived, that he died, that he left behind these books or this battle or that bridge — none of that tells us very much.
(Paul Auster)
…and:
My Love
(excerpt)It’s not the lover that we love, but love
itself, love as in nothing, as in O;
love is the lover’s coin, a coin of no country,
hence: the ring; hence: the moon —
no wonder that empty circle so often figures
in our intimate dark, our skin-trade,
that commerce so furious we often think
love’s something we share; but we’re always wrong.
(Don Paterson [source])
…and:
The Storm
Now through the white orchard my little dog
romps, breaking the new snow
with wild feet.
Running here running there, excited,
hardly able to stop, he leaps, he spins
until the white snow is written upon
in large, exuberant letters,
a long sentence, expressing
the pleasures of the body in this world.Oh, I could not have said it better
myself.
(Mary Oliver [source])
Mung-Bodied: A Reverie
[Image: schematic of a “Rube Goldberg” solution to the challenge of waking up a laptop, by a fifth-grade physical science project team. For details, see the note at the bottom of this post.]
When I was a kid, one of the things which could — without fail! — get all of us laughing was for somebody to go all suddenly and unintentionally tongue-tied. Mung-tongued, we called it. In a little one of his stand-up bits, Steve Martin asked the audience rhetorically something like this: Are you ever talking along and all of a sudden your tongue gets away from you and ywannguhmelizzorwhat? (I laughed at that, too.)
But you know what? The tongue finds lots of company among the other muscles.
Midweek Music Break: [Unknown Artist], “[Unknown Christmas Song]”Mannheim Steamroller, “Kling Glöckchen”
Yes, the “1” is a typo.
Update, 4:36pm EST: the mystery is solved! (See comments.)
You know how difficult it is to identify a song when you don’t know anything about it, except that you sorta-kinda like the way it sounds? Right: that difficult. And I’ve got such a song for you today…
Background: Some years ago, I had successfully ripped all of our many, many Christmas CDs to my computer, so I could set up an infinitely-repeating, ever-shuffled background playlist while I worked. Boy, that was great. (Because, y’know, even though one wants to hear Christmas music for only a couple-three weeks out of the year, during that period one really wants to hear it.)
Problems ensued, however — in particular, the problem of limited disk space. (We must have had twenty or more of these CDs at the time, and every year, it seemed, we’d add another.) I kept getting all of these warning messages from my PC that I needed to free up some space, or risk (a) crashing, (b) unsatisfactory performance, and/or (c) so on. My solution was ingenious, or so I thought (never too busy for a self-inflicted pat on the back!): after the holiday season that year, I burned the entire shuffled Christmas playlist to as many CDs as it took. (It took fewer than the original, because I could cram 20-25 songs on a disk, unlike the manufacturers who included only a dozen or so.) I could just label the CDs like christmas 1, christmas 2, etc., because when I wanted to listen to CDs as opposed to music-on-the-hard-drive I’d probably be in the car and wouldn’t need song details.
…so, having burned the stack of CDs, I then — post-holiday, remember? — deleted all the Christmas music from my hard drive. Because I could always re-rip them as needed, right?
What a dummy. Because, as it happened, I just might not know the title or artist of a particular song. You know — the sort of information which is typically lost when you burn a music CD.
Which brings me to… this week’s selection.
First solution: identify it via a lyrics search. Except I can’t make out the lyrics (other than the ting-a-ling-a-lings, and I’m not even sure of those). For a couple of minutes, I even dragged The Missus into the question. (Involving her in my personal and generally fleeting obsessions tends not to be fruitful for either of us, let alone for us together.) Maybe they’re in some other language???
I kinda remembered encountering an online music database that enabled you to search for a song using just the tune — by humming or whistling it, for instance. Maybe Musipedia, although I seem to remember it had a catchier name… I think I told a nephew about it… or maybe just scratched a note to myself… […mucks about in browser history and emails sent to himself to help him remember stuff later…] Oh, right: I think it was this one (although its feature list seems to have shrunk). But so far I’ve had no luck with either.
So that’s today’s dilemma. Anyone know what this song is?
[Below, click Play button to begin [Unknown Christmas Song]. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 1:51 long.]
[audio:unknownchristmassong_unknownartist.mp3|titles=’Unknown Christmas Song’|artists=Unknown Artist]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 3
- 4
- 5
