Clong Bong Doyoyoing

I have, of course, been drawn to novelty music since my older brother Jeff introduced me to Weird Al Yankovic and my mother introduced me to Spike Jones.

Since those young days, though, I've gone through several odd sound rabbit holes and found something fun today: A collection of odd noises from the BBC.

Now we Americans have our fair share of odd noises, but to hear the odd noises of a different culture is fun.

The "clong bong doyoyoing" is, if I'm honest, a little disasppointing, but you don't want to miss the "Irish Nightingale."

"Several Men Coughing," however, is downright disturbing.

The Unhinged, Boat Shoe-Wearing Lightfoot Fan on the Shores of Oakley Reservoir

Many years ago, as we were struggling to find an impromptu campsite after our first choice fell through near the City of Rocks, we happened across a spot on the shores of a reservoir, not far from other campers.

A slightly unhinged woman from the group stomped over to suggest we leave, as the site was theirs, inviolate, and they were expecting others.

To prove her point, she played some Gordon Lightfoot at high volume, hoping to inspire us to leave.

We did leave, not because of the Gordon Lightfoot, but because she struck us as the type who'd back over our tent with us in it.

Since then, every time I hear Gordon Lightfoot sing -- and I really enjoy his music -- I fet a little frisson of adrenaline, remembering the Unhinged Boat Shoe-Wearing Lightfoot Fan on the Shores of Oakley Reservoir.

Thanks for the memories, Mr. Lightfoot. Even the slightly scary ones.

She tried to scare us off with this, as I recall. Which is chillingly ironic:

DRILL!

The good news is, the drill at work is over.

The bad news is, I suck.

But that's okay. I volunteered for this program to learn, and learning I shall do. But sometimes I feel like poor Homer:



So I fear in the future we'll have more frequent drills in order to hammer this stuff into our heads. And that's okay. If you learn a skill and then apply it only occasionally, that's asking for trouble. That is, in fact, asking for and inviting an error precursor into your life. Sure, it's nice not to have drills with brutal frequency, but it is also nice, once a drill comes, that you actually remember how to do things.

This comes down to the difference between book smarts and street smarts. All of us in the room have had the training by the book, but sometimes it's a whole different ballgame when you go to apply things in a real situation. That's why, for instance, they have you actually get behind a wheel when you're in drivers education. Doing otherwise might be less stressfull, but infinitely more foolish. So I should look forward to the drills so I can apply what I've learned. Though the drills are not fun, after each successive drill, they'll get easier because I'll become used to what is supposed to happen.

Annoying Others More Efficiently Since, oh, 1995

First of all: If you're into odd music like I am, you can't do any better than to check out New Jersey radio station WFMU's "Beware of the Blog" (link on the left). In the last few weeks, they've helped me find siren songs from Jerry Colonna, Bob Hope's old radio days sidekick, Leona Anderson's painful "Music to Suffer By" and, my latest interest, an odd musical style called "eefing," which apparently had only one star, Jimmy Riddle, who died a tragic death by drowning in the Cumberland River. Eefing may indeed top the yodeling MP3s I got from WMFU as the music most likely to annoy my wife. (If you visit, be aware sometimes the boys' language isn't up to much. They're not dropping f-bombs all over the place, just an occasional tactical strike. So you're warned.)

I blame my mother. She's the one who introduced Spike Jones, Fibber McGee and Molly and a few other old-time radio shows. They quickly pushed me down the slippery slope of oddball and odd music and radio until I was blissfully streaming down that creek without a care that I don't have a paddle to get back out.

And that's one of the great things I appreciate about the Internt. It has increase my ability to annoy my wife a hundredfold. Not that I go out of my way to annoy her, but with the ease it brings things like eefing and Leona Anderson into my life, it's like having a new flavor of push-button annoyance at my fingertips whenever I want/need one. It's great.

What Would the Aliens Think?

When the Voyager spacecraft were launched to explore our solar system in the late 1970s, they bore with them a gold-coated, copper phonograph record which featured music by Bach and Peruvian pan fluters, greetings from folks from the likes of Vietnam, Poland and the United States and sounds ranging from a babbling brook to the rumble of an internal combustion engine. (Read more about the record here.) NASA scientists and, notably, Carl Sagan, hoped an alien intelligence finding Voyager and successfully decoding the data on the record would have a glimpse of what life was like on Earth when the Voyagers were launched.

It's a fair bet, though, that eefing wasn't included. Here's a sample:



I vaguely remember this from Hee-Haw, but, of course, was too young to appreciate this oddly American musical style. What would the aliens think? It's hard to say.

Ray Stevens does a little eefing in his albums. It's quite possible Spike Jones knows of it, or at least regarded it as a musical novelty akin to his own. But it's hard to see how eefing could enter the pop mainstream. Anyone interested in forming a new eefing and hamboning group, let me know.

Also, boys, I love the suits. If I could fine one like it (bargain-basement lime-green polyester) I'd wear it in a heartbeat.

Zaftig

Learning something new every day is, by all appearances, a good thing. But it's not without risk.

Today,l while reading a National Geographic article on a healthcare program in rural India, I cam across this sentence: "She is often accompanied by Babai Sathe, an exuberant woman of 47, a bit zaftig, with a toothy smile."

Zaftig. I had to look it up, anticipating it would mean something along the lines of loony, high-spirited, or exuberant (given that the author qualified this lady's zaftigness with the phrase "a bit").

Alas.

With the delicate, exacting gusto typical of most dictionaries, Houghton Mifflin's American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines zaftig thusly:

1. Full-bosomed. 2. Having a comfortably ample figure.

Using such a word is fraught with risk. One, you have to explain it. Two, given the two definitions, it's clear that the word is unisex, though a male described as zaftig might take offense at the primary definition. A zaftig followed by a zap or a zinger would not be pleasant.

Additionally, it's my experience that you're either zaftig or not, and that there ought not to be any qualifying statements to define one's state of zaftigness, so the author threw me on this. But I did indeed learn something. Now I just have to figure out how to use the word in polite conversation. Outside of a Scrabble game.

Weird Up Your Friends

So, a while back I shared a way in which you can weird up your kids. Now here's one to try on adults:

If someone asks you what your political views are, respond this way: "I am a strict diageotropist." It's something they can't argue with, no matter their political stripe.

Paranoia

Thursday, sweet Thursday.

Stumbled across a memory from the past (as opposed to those pesky memories from the future) yesterday: The Conet Project. For the uninitiated, the project is a collection of "numbers stations" recordings made in the UK by a shortwave radio enthusiast. It's basically like the recording John Travolta's character in Phenomenon decodes, getting his farmer buddy in deep, deep trouble. I heard a NPR report on the release of a four-disc set of the recordings, and was fascinated.

The individual who recorded the transmissions is obviously a paranoiac. Now, I work as a subcontractor to a contractor doing work for the federal government, so the idea that the government is up to shady shenanigans isn't a mystery to me. They shouldn't be sneaking about, planting evidence of transvestisism into the governments of other nations. But what ya gonna do? Listen to The Conet Project, get jumpy when you get caught in the beam of those traffic cams and look over your shoulder a lot. Because The Man* is going to do what he wants to do, whether or not a helpless rabble of citizens is up in arms about it or not. I may start up my own numbers station just to make everybody go completely bonkers.

So what else is going on in my life? It is Thursday, sweet Thursday. We had a late blizzard this morning that closed roads and schools, but it only happened in the valley; out here in the Lost River Desert, we've got the wind and the cold, but the moisture stayed away from us.

What I enjoy about these kinds of things (including aliens, bigfoot, the Kennedy assasination, et cetera) is how ordinary people like myself pore over the evidence -- and by that I mean we limit our research to Wikipedia, quotes from Dale from King of the Hill and videos from YouTube -- and, poof, transform ourselves into Instant Experts (TM). We've got it covered. We know what happened at Dealey Plaza, what exactly is tromping around in the Cascades, who really shot J.R. and we know, for a fact, despite we've only seen a tiny, tiny picture of the parachute those kids in Oregon dug up last week that it HAS to be the one used by D.B. Cooper because it looks exactly like the period parachute they used in that episode of the X Files. I guess what I'm saying is that 99.99999999 percent of these so-called Internet experts ought to stick to pounding sand. (I'm not comparing The Conet Project to this; as those guys have obviously worked hard to uncover what little bit they have uncovered, by which I mean they haven't uncovered enough.)

Ahh, how I wish Dick Cheney would shoot some other hunting partner, just so I could have something to chuckle about.

Speaking of chuckling: WHo does Hillary Rodham Clinton think she is? Oh yeah. She thinks she's Hillary Rodham Clinton. Since I live in one of the "unimportant" states that Barack Obama won, I'm a little leery at her attitude of wanting to win the Democratic nomination at all costs. She seems determined that it's the delegate count, rather than the voice of the people, which ought to decide elections. Those who side with her on this ought to remember that's the argument (cue lugubrious organ music) George W. Bush used in 2000 when he lost the popular vote to Al Gore but won the electoral college. (Claim apples and oranges on me if you will, but I believe there are enough parallels between the delegate/superdelegate nomination system and the Electoral College system, neither of which makes much sense to me.)

I now descend from my soapbox.

*If you don't know who/what "The Man" is, I'm truly sorry for the limits of your knowledge.