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10. Reasons to Be Amused, from Silver to Sexton. A random journey.
Written by Jimmy
Here’s my list of reasons to be amused 24/7.
10. We live in a world where you can say 24/7 and a) people know what you’re talking about and b) no one kills you for saying something so stupid as 24/7. That’s amusing. Back in the late 80’s, when the world was dominated by voicemail systems (vs. e mail) and Lotus vs. excell, we used to say things like star star 7 the nukes’ (**7 rushed a message in voicemail to end and deleted it) and ‘slash file save the whales’ (/f,s was / for menu, file and save for Lotus.) And now we have emoticons
9. You can read long articles on the origins of emoticons by writing the word emoticon in google search and clicking on wiki. And you’ll learn things like: Western ones look like this: : ) and Eastern ones look like this: (^_^). Which means Asian invest far more in faces and making their emoticons look like their standing up vs. ours which are always lying down, which might be a BIG metaphor for the rise of East and fall of West, but that wouldn’t be amusing so i’m not going there.
8. With a computer in your lap you are four clicks away from some really weird stuff. I’ll illustrate randomly. Please enjoy my journey. So I start at Google, and search for weird stuff. You are now here. From here, I go to to stunning stuff, because that seemed the right thing to do – i’m doin’ this real time just to show you how easy it is to be amused. So real time and not at all clear where we are going. So, now I’m here. And I discover that a dog saved a baby in Kenya. I’m now here. Cool little story about a baby that was abandoned and saved by a dog- very cool. Happy with that and amusing. But then I discover a little quote on the right of article — you can see it. And here it is: No word in the English language rhymes with “month”, “orange”, “silver” or “purple”. I didn’t know that. But that is really amusing. And I got there in three clicks heading for weird stuff, getting distracting by a baby saving story and then finding in a couple clicks why I’ve been struggling with my song about my orange loving purple dragon stealing silver once a month from a guy named Mitchell.
7. And now we’re talking about rhymes and my failed song. But another way to be amused is to look at great rhymes in music. I’ve got only two to put forward. My first is ‘I Am I Said’ by Neil Diamond. Here’s the winning bit:
I am, I said
To no one there
And no one heard at all
Not even the chair
I am, I cried
I am, said I
And I am lost, and I can’t even say why
Leavin’ me lonely still
I just love that Neil is sitting there thinking about no one there. And he’s in a room alone. And there it was. A chair. And it rhymed. But Dear God Neil. But to be fair, I would have written, ‘I Am I Said, alone with the silver, and no one heard at all, not even the …………. ‘ oh damn, caught again. My next nominee is Ice Ice Baby, from Vanilla Ice. Now this I really, really love:
Now that the party is jumping
With the bass kicked in and the vegas are pumpin’
Quick to the point to the point no faking
I’m cooking MC’s like a pound of bacon
So, I’m just imagining Mr. Ice siting there. i’m sure he’s thinkin’ about bein’ hot, cookin’ red hot, master flash awesome rapper dude. And I imagine it just came to him – I’m cooking like a pound of bacon. Think about it. I’m stretched out all thin in a vat of my own sizzling fat, the more i cook, the smaller I get, i get all crispy and crumbly — yes, i’m so hot right now i’m a shrinking slab of fat roasting in my own goo! Awesome. And of course from there moving from bacon to faking is pretty easy. Although our trusty rhymin dictionary could have helped:
2 syllables:
aken, chaiken, hakan, macon, raycon, shaiken, shaken, taken, waken
3 syllables:
awaken, forsaken, jamaican, mcmaken, mistaken, retaken, unshaken
4 syllables:
reawaken, takla-makan
If he had written when the world wide web was up and running, here is where this would have gone:
Now that the party is jumping
With the bass kicked in and the vegas are pumpin’
Quick to the point pretending i’m jamaican
I’m cooking but shrinking like a strip o bacon
And this amuses me.
6. This is getting really fun. So now I’m on bacon. And what really amuses me is the role of bacon in our new more healthy diets. There’s a lot of fun images, but as I’m a parent of teenagers, I must say I regret not knowing about this and feeding this to my little kids — here’s to Turtle Bacon:
5. Now i’m on to turtles and frogs. Didn’t know I would be, ‘cuz i didn’t know my discussion of bacon would lead here. But that is amusing to me. And it reminded me of frogger. So I clicked on line for frogger and got this. Watch the right lane
4. Which gets me into the whole funny youtube thing, which always amuses me. We spend a lot of time orienting you to our favourites. Because we are trying to make you smile and feel happier with your lot after this than before, seems to me you need to watch some lucky people. Here are a couple
3. Which leads to a discussion of lucky people. I think i am lucky to have seen this guy live.
2. You must be getting tired going thru this. But I do think this is the fastest 4 seconds to a giggle on youtube. It amuses me, but makes my head hurt a bit
1. That’s it. 30 minutes on the computer can occassionaly make me smile, especially when also watching TV and listening to lastfm (go here for some cool new music). I think what really keeps me smilin’ is that with one click I can settle down to a favourite song… And I decided to bring you to this one
Well done Suzanne. And speaking of really good ‘diner songs’ let’s not forget this one
And finally Martin Sexton, The Scrubs and a Diner. This seriously, seriously keeps me very amused. We need to make music like this. We really do.
You can hear the original here. But let’s close how we started. With a desire to be happy. With music. with the endless search for a rhyme for silver. And we’ll let Martin Sexton close us out. Along with Paulo and our very own Gus, an Abubilla God.
Bye bye.
Jimmy