I've ordered this book through Amazon and am looking forward to receiving it. I've read one of Dave Barry's novels, called Tricky Business, which is hilarious. He writes in a similar vein, and sets his stories in a similar environment as Carl Hiaasen does. 'Big Trouble', another of his books arrived this week but my daughter gets first read. I love books that make me laugh out loud... when strangers on the train start laughing with you, even though they don't know what you're reading, you know you are really expressing your enjoyment!
The worst songs ever, according to the Miami Herald survey, which formed the basis for Dave's book, are:
I never minded MacArthur Park - I quite liked the dramatic orchestral score, and Harris had quite a nice falsetto. The words are pretty silly though. And of course Yummy Yummy Yummy is Bubblegum Pop, but it has quite a nice tune and is fairly innocuous. You're having my baby I have always loathed. It's execrable. I haven't heard Timothy, but I think Rupert Holmes was responsible for the Pina Colada song, so that doesn't bode well for Timothy. And Achy Breaky Heart is fairly ghastly, as is the mullet of the man who sang it! I'll discuss the other 'Really Bad Songs' after I've read the book, but there are some that really must be included, like Seasons in the Sun, Leader of the Pack, Hungry like the Wolf, and anything by Tiny Tim, just for starters.
Dave's book also, I believe discusses Mondegreens. From Wikipedia...
A Mondegreen is a line of lyrics people hear incorrectly, the term was coined by
When I was a child, my mother used to read aloud to me from Percy's Reliques, and one of my favorite poems began, as I remember:
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands,
Oh, where hae ye been?
They hae slain the Earl Amurray, [sic]
And Lady Mondegreen.
The actual fourth line is "And laid him on the green." As Wright
explained the need for a new term, "The point about what I shall
hereafter call mondegreens, since no one else has thought up a word for
them, is that they are better than the original."
The "top 3" mondegreens according to one writer are:
Gladly the cross-eyed bear (from the line in the hymn "Keep Thou My Way" by Fanny Crosby, "Kept by Thy tender care, gladly the cross I'll bear")
'Scuse me while I kiss this guy (from a lyric in the song "Purple Haze", by Jimi Hendrix: "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky").
The first line of the Australian National Anthem "Advance Australia
Fair" was originally written as "Australia’s Sons let us rejoice, for
we are young and free". According to Wikipedia, the song became popularly known as "The Ostrich
Song" after the mondegreen "Australia, Sunset Ostriches for we are
young and free".
We now sing 'Australians all let us rejoice' - a bit more inclusive! And ostriches aren't native to Australia, though the Emu, one of its relatives, most definitely is!
My kids' nephew Zachary turned one on the weekend. My son took some lovely pictures at his party, and one of them just begged to be paint-shopped into the famous Michaelangelo painting of God and Adam.
Here's a You Tube I had to share. It's mean, but it's very funny. And I'm sure if I tried to sing a Bulgarian song in Bulgarian without being able to speak it I'd be just as bad. But it is funny.
Can you think of any more songs that could be made into diagrams? I can see The higher they climb, the harder they fall as a line graph; Once, Twice, Three Times a Lady as an algebraic formula... and then the ideas fail me!
Yesterday my friend Jay and I made a 'croquembouche' cake for an engagement party. It took all day (it won't take as long next time we make one, given the trial and error involved!) We had to make about 60 profiterole cases, custard to fill them with, and toffee to bind the cake together and stick the profiteroles to the cone. It actually turned out very well. The profiteroles were devoured by the guests and we got to bask in a bit of glory. Jay had made eclairs before but I had never attempted any fancy sort of pastry. The recipe was from the internet too! We didn't have a plain piping nozzle but it didn't seem to matter.
The finished article,decorated with a few sugar flowers, toffee strands and drizzled dark chocolate.
The party was a masquerade - a plain mask was issued with the invitations, to be decorated at our whim. I made a fairly unremarkable embellishment to mine, but when I got to his place, Jay asked me to make him an 'Easter Island Statue' mask. So while he made pastry and custard, I assembled a card-creation, stuck tissue paper on it for texture and painted it to resemble granite. It got voted best mask.. A long hard day, but a lot of fun and a pay-off from the reactions we got!
Question: how do you know when you're attending a REALLY boring meeting? When you look at the minutes you've taken and know you weren't paying proper attention... (some unprofessional words removed)...
From a Shout , which is the name of this statue in our city (I had to take a photo of the seagull on its head...)
To a Whisper, which I took at my night fill job... excuse the terrible eye-shattering blur... why on earth are fresh, new, still-in-the-box feminine hygiene products regarded as Dangerous Goods? I've never seen any explode! Is there something they're not telling us?
Tim (my boy) is studying photography at Technical College, and is using a film camera at the moment to take slides. He bought himself a slide scanner, so recently we went through some of my parents' enormous collection of slides, which entertained me often when I was a kid (before we were allowed to have a TV!). My parents met in Kuwait having gone to the middle east to teach (Mum) and work for an oil company (Dad). They both took some wonderful photos, but its my Mum's recording of Iran in the mid-1950s which I remember most fondly . She captured the place before the craziness of the late 1970s, early 80s and beyond. Similar sights might still be seen there, but to me, Mum's photos are really special. Here are just three that we have scanned. The one of the bazaar is perhaps my favourite - it somehow looks better when its projected as a slide, but having seen it scanned, I have noticed interesting details previously unseen.
and just to illustrate that slides taken many years ago can retain their brilliant colour, here's one of me, when I was young and blond
