Wikipedia: I could read this stuff all day long

I love Wikipedia. I think it is one of the single greatest creations in human history. Reading Wikipedia has become a bit of a passion for me. Though there is always a reason I find myself plowing through a passage, I am never disappointed with what I find.

A couple days ago I read the entry for "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da", one of my favorite Beatles’ songs, looking for the origin behind the phrase Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da.

It turns out that Paul stole it from an African conga player and was later sued for royalties.

I also learned that Paul wrote the song but John hated it, eventually forcing a more up-tempo beat after a heated exchange.

Also, the line, "Desmond stays at home and does his pretty face" was a mistake. Paul sung the line incorrectly during a recording session (Molly was supposed to be at home, doing her pretty face), but the rest of the band liked the mistake so much that it stuck.

Yesterday I read the entry for Dirty Dancing, learning among other things that Jennifer Grey and Patrick Swayze did not get along during much of the filming of the movie, something you might have never guessed based upon the final product.

Also, Dirty Dancing is in large part based on screenwriter Eleanor Bergstein's own childhood. She is the younger daughter of a Jewish doctor from New York, spent summers with her family in the Catskills, participated in "Dirty Dancing" competitions, and was herself called "Baby" as a girl.

Bergstein was apparently talking about herself when she wrote, “Nobody puts Baby in the corner.”

See what I mean? Every entry is a fascinating story waiting to be discovered.

For all it’s greatness, however, Wikipedia does have it's problems. The most glaring (other than a lack of an entry for me) is its frequent need for a professional editor.

This morning I was researching New Jersey Turnpike rest stops for the book I am writing. The Turnpike names each of its rest stops after famous people from New Jersey, and I needed the name of a northbound rest stop close to New York.

Naturally I found it on Wikipedia.

But the list (pasted below) needs an editor badly. The blinding repetition and unnecessary redundancy contained made me want to pull my hair out.

Clara Barton Service Area named after Clara Barton. Molly Pitcher Service Area named after Molly Pitcher. Thomas Edison Service Area named after… you guessed it. Thomas Edison.

And yes, I know that I could edit the list myself and thus contribute a small part to the greatness of Wikipedia, but I am in the midst of writing at least three books (not to mention this blog, a children’s book, a short story, and a dozen other smaller pieces), so my time and energy are best directed elsewhere.

And besides, I try to avoid writing for free at all costs.

Also, there are people in the world who actually enjoy writing, editing and otherwise maintaining Wikipedia.

I enjoy benefiting from their efforts.

Unforgettable duet

Tonight I put my daughter to bed on my own.  She asked me to sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.

I started singing, and then she joined me. 

A first. 

We sang the whole thing together. 

I’m writing it down now so I won’t forget this moment, but I suspect that it won’t be necessary. 

Singular talent absent opportunity

This is one of those completely amazing, captivating and awe-inspiring performances that takes my breath away but then leaves me wondering to what purpose it serves other than to entertain me for a couple minutes.

It’s almost tragic. 

This guy can do something that very few people in the world can do, and yet as far as I can tell, it’s only good for the occasional YouTube video.  

It’s not the song (which is great), but the time and station that matter most

Have you seen Neil Patrick Harris’s opening song to this year’s Tony Awards? It’s outstanding, even with Brooke Shield’s blatant attempt to ruin it.

But you know what I liked best about the performance?

Imagining the horrified looks on the faces of all the bigoted homophobes when they realized that this man singing this song was being aired during the so-called “family hour” of network television.

On a Sunday night, no less.

How gloriously quickly the world is changing for the better.

Not the best tribute to firefighters

When I was about ten-years old, I was awakened from my bed by a firefighter. Rather disconcerting, I can assure you.

Our chimney was on fire. Several people stopped their cars along the side of the road, knocked on our door and warned my parents that the chimney was on fire. Sparks and flames were shooting out from the brick structure into the night sky. But my step-father scoffed at the notion, assuring each would-be savior that he was just burning some green wood in the wood burning stove.

He never even bothered to step outside the house to take a look at the chimney.

Eventually the fire department arrived and informed my step-father that he was a moron. Then they evacuated the kids from the house.

So I respect firefighters a lot. They carried me out of my childhood home that night to safety, and for a long time I considered becoming a volunteer firefighter.

That said, I do not endorse Cee Lo Green’s new song dedicated to firefighters.

Green, whose mother was a firefighter and who was rescued from a car wreck by firefighters as well, rewrote the lyrics of his well-known song F**k You again, this time changing the name of the song to Thank You and spinning the lyrics into a song of appreciation for all the firefighters who risk their lives everyday for morons like my stepfather.

I say again because he already changed the song to Forget You in order to garner radio play and inclusion on movie soundtracks, a decision that I also did not endorse.

While I am typically opposed to vulgarity in music, the use of it in this particular song was so perfect that I was willing to make an exception to my rule.

Despite the language, and perhaps in part because of it, I love this song in its original form.

Love it.

Forget You is a shadow of the songs former self, and changing the lyrics for a third time, even for such a good cause, makes the song seem like an empty vessel into which Green can dump any two word sentiment that suits the occasion, an aspect is highlighted in this new version song when Green sings, “I wrote this song about you. What would we do without you?”

He didn’t write this song about firefighters. He wrote the song about a guy who has been dumped by a girl because he didn’t have enough money.

The lyric should read, “I re-re-wrote this song about you. What would I do with it?”

It’s not easy (and perhaps not wise) to criticize a song written in honor of firefighters, but it is slightly less difficult to criticize a song that has been re-re-written to honor firefighters.

Just write a new song, Cee Lo. Don’t marginalize and commercialize a song that was at one time so perfect.

And as you watch the video, could someone please explain Green’s use of his iPhone as he record the song? Is he really reading the lyrics off the phone?  Or using some metronome app? Or making a personal recording of the recording?

Or is he just checking email, which is what it looks like to me.

Her very own sidekick! She must be stopped!

One of my daughter’s favorite songs is The Beatles’ “Her Majesty.” When it comes time for my wife to sing to her at night before bed, she asks for this song a lot, referring to it as the “nice girl” song. Leave it to my wife to teach my daughter about one of the few Beatles’ songs to which I am not familiar.

And not through any fault of my own.

"Her Majesty" is the final track of The Beatles’ album, Abbey Road, appearing fourteen seconds after the song "The End" and unlisted on the album’s original jacket.

As such, it is considered one of the first examples of a hidden track in rock music.

And as such, it tends to be one of the more obscure Beatles songs.

As a wedding DJ and music lover, there was a time in my life when I was the most knowledgeable person in my social circle when it came to music. A song came on the radio and I would be the first one to name the title and artist.

In a time before apps like Shazam could analyze and identify music in seconds, I was the next best thing.

Then my wife came along with her savant-like musical abilities. In second, she had made my knowledge of music seem trivial and insignificant.

Elysha is the Rain Man of music, and she’s annoyingly humble and dismissive about this near superhuman power.

And now she’s teaching my daughter about hidden Beatles tracks when there are literally hundreds of better known songs that Clara would equally enjoy.

I’ll tell you what she’s doing:

She’s creating another musical savant right under my nose.

It’s not enough that she has so thoroughly undermined my area of expertise. Before she’s finished, she’ll have my daughter snickering at my piddly excuse for musical knowledge.

With enough training, she could probably get Clara to name songs before they are even played on the radio.

She’ll have my daughter correctly predicting radio station playlists before they are even played.

My wife is creating a sidekick.

A Robin to her Batman.

I wish it were for nefarious purposes, because this is where I want to say, “She must be stopped!”

Except that Elysha doesn’t have a nefarious bone in her body.

So annoying.

And the winner is?

Weezer's first gig was opening for Keanu Reeves' band. I’m not quite sure who should feel worse about this.

Top 10 post-wedding thoughts

Last night’s wedding was the first of the year.  Amidst the mixing of music and making announcements came the following random thoughts: _______________________________________________

1. I have no respect for a minister or justice of the peace who requires a microphone at a wedding ceremony. The ability to project one’s voice should be a prerequisite for the job.

2. Vodka and Diet Coke are two words that should never be spoken together.

3. One of the most embarrassing moments as a DJ was the night that I accidentally played the Jerry Maguire mix of Springsteen’s Secret Garden, with dialogue by Tom Cruise, Renee Zellweger and Cuba Gooding, Jr. interspersed throughout the song. A four-minute cringe that I am reminded of every time I play the correct version of the song (I deleted the Jerry Maguire version immediately after playing it).

4. The bride and groom should never be criticized for scheduling their wedding on the Saturday before Easter. There’s no such thing as Easter Eve, jerk-face.

5.  If you are so tall that you can see over the restroom stall, you should never choose the urinal directly adjacent to the stall, especially when the DJ is changing into his tuxedo and likes to put on a fresh pair of underwear prior to a wedding because it makes him feel a little better about the next seven hours he will spend on his feet.

6. When your dress is shorter than the tee-shirt that my wife wears to bed, it ceases being attractive.

7. Announcing that the groom’s favorite hockey team is winning is never recommended, because when the Bruins give up the tying goal with eight minutes left and are eventually forced to win in a shoot-out after a full overtime period, you spend the remainder of the wedding worried that Boston might lose and you will look like a jackass for insisting that the DJ announce the score before the game was over.

8.  Flirting with the DJ in order to get him to play The Cupid Shuffle is both ineffectual and embarrassing for the both of us.

9.  The value of a competent, experienced maid of honor cannot be overestimated.

10.  As much as I love Louis Armstrong’s "What a Wonderful World," Joey Ramone’s version of the song is emphatically better.

The ability to make fun of oneself is a sign of great intellect.

The willingness to do so is a sign of great inner strength.

Bravo, Rebecca Black.  Even if your song sucks.

Friday Lyrics Analyzed with Rebecca Black from Rebecca Black

But can I sing the N-word?

I am not a person who would ever use the N-word. While I don’t support the  revision of Huckleberry Finn that excludes the N-word, it is not a word that I would typically use in my own writing and would never use it in conversation. But I have a problem.

What if the word is used in a song?

Up until this point, the question has been moot. The use of the N-word in music is typically restricted to hip hop and rap, and I am not a big fan of either genre. I am also opposed to the consistent use of vulgarity in music, seeing it as an easy and cheap way to heighten the emotional quotient of a song.

But now I have a problem.

Despite the vulgarity that infuses most of Cee Lo Green’s F-You, I love this song. I think it is funny and honest and almost perfect, and the recent remixes of the song that strip it of its profanity are neutered and terrible.

For once in my life, I find a profanity-laced song incredibly enjoyable.

But the song also includes the N-word.

So the other day I found myself singing along to the song in my car when I came upon the verse that includes the N-word.

Was I supposed to stop singing?

Should I have replaced the N-word with a palatable alternative, as has been done in the recent edition of Huckleberry Finn?

Should I have bleeped the offensive word out?

Should I simply never sing the song?

What is a white guy to do when he wants to sing along to a song that includes the N-word?

I’m stuck.

The Legend of Billie Jean: Fingers crossed it’s as good as I remember.

In 1985 I went to the movies and saw the film The Legend of Billie Jean. I remember liking it a lot, but I was fourteen years old at the time, so my standards regarding the quality of a film were possibly questionable. The movie stars Helen Slater as a rebel teenager who gets in trouble with the law over a scooter repair.

Sort of a teenage version of Thelma and Louise. Except events center on a scooter repair.

The movie’s tagline was:

When you're seventeen, people think they can do anything to you. Billie Jean is about to prove them wrong.

I’ll be honest. I don’t remember the scooter at all. I’m sure it fits in seamlessly with the highly evolved plot, but it sounds a little odd without context.

The film also stars Christian Slater (not related to Helen, though their mutual appearance in the film would lead some people to assume that they are brother and sister to this day) and a host of B-level movie stars from the 1980's, including Yeardley Smith, Dean Stockwell and Peter Coyote.

Not exactly an all-star cast, but that doesn’t mean anything.

Right?

The movie comes up often in conversation because of the movie’s soundtrack, which featured Pat Benetar’s Invincible, a song specifically written for the film. Whenever I hear the song, I am compelled to ask whoever is around if they ever saw the film, and I have yet to meet anyone who did.

Not one.

Based upon my wife’s most recent response to this question, I suspect that I may have asked it more than once.

So I decided to purchase a copy of the film for her to watch, so the cheese would no longer stand alone.

It wasn’t easy. The movie was never released to DVD, even though Yeardley Smith said in a recent interview that she had recorded a DVD commentary in 2008 and that the DVD was supposed to have been released that same year. In 2009, Columbia Pictures released the film to Europe, and after much finagling, I finally managed to purchase a copy.

With a bowl of ice cream in hand, we are about to watch it.

I’m a little afraid.

I’m starting to regret tracking the film down in the first place.

I fear that it will be terrible and all of these years of searching for someone who watched The Legend of Billie Jean will be for naught.

Fingers crossed, I’m hitting Play now.

I wish I had thought of this first

Slash gets picky at the wrong time

Guns N’ Roses’ guitarist Slash refuses to allow the band’s music to be used on Glee because he thinks the show is horrible. He went on the record with Rolling Stone magazine saying, “Glee is worse than Grease and Grease is bad enough. I look at Grease now and think, ‘Between High School Musical and Glee, Grease was a work of art!’”

And yet he decided that this year’s Super Bowl halftime show was worthy of his presence?

And he thought it would be a great idea if Fergie attempted an Axl Rose impression while hollering the lyrics to Guns N’ Roses classic Sweet Child o’ Mine?

At least Glee is a comedy. It’s not supposed to be taken seriously.

This year’s halftime show was more like a tragic comedy.

Even my ten-year old students hated it.

Good call, Slash.

I like Homer’s version better

I have nothing against sampling, but when you rip off a cartoon character, that’s pretty weak.

Mammoths, octopi and a whole bunch of spoons

Three random observations: 1. Anyone who criticizes Alanis Morissette’s song "Ironic" for its lack of irony is an intellectual douchebag. It’s a four minute pop song. It need not be held up to a literary standard.

And sure, “...ten thousand spoons when all you need is a knife” is not ironic by the truest definition of the word, but it seems pretty damn ironic to me.

2. I know it was based upon the Ian Fleming novel, but how does the movie Octopussy get made with its original title?

3.  Woolly mammoths returning to the world? It’s about time.

Let's start applauding all church organists

Note: This post has been revised upon the suggestion of a reader. Additions to the original post are made in red. Church organists, in some many, many places, seem to have the worst gig in town. In my limited experience, the pay must be is miserable (if they are paid at all) and many, many of them never, ever receive a round of applause.

Every year I attend midnight mass with Elysha and a couple of our friends, and every year the poor organ player plays her heart out, starting with Christmas music thirty minutes before the service starts and continuing throughout the service, switching from organ to piano then back to organ.

But never a single round of applause. Not even a few words of acknowledgement from the preacher man.

I've experienced a similar situation at another local church, and this was the case in every church that I attended as a child (three in all).

This is certainly not the case for all churches (as I have learned the hard way), but for at least some, the organist seems to be unjustly ignored. Perhaps these organists prefer to remain unrecognized, but even so, it feels wrong to me. 

I've also been told (and church doctrine as it appears on the Internet bears this out) that Catholic organists are never applauded.

That, my friends, is a lot of organists. I may have assumed a little too much in my original post (since some organists are apparently treated brilliantly), but do you have any idea how many Catholic churches there are?

I did the research. There are 68,293,869 Catholics in the United States (22% of the U.S. population), and 1.1 billion Catholics worldwide. In the United States alone, there are 17,644 Catholic churches.

That is a lot of organists. 22% of the organists, if population roughly equates to number of organists, and that doesn't include the many other churches where organists go unrecognized as well.

It's not all the organists, thank goodness, but it's a lot. 

Are there any other musicians in the world that don't receive applause after playing?

I don't think so.

Ignoring these musicians never feels right to me, and I'm not sure why we don't applaud them for their effort and skill.

Perhaps there is an assumption that God doesn’t like to share the limelight.

Brick House and breasts

I hate the song Brick House by The Commodores. But as a wedding DJ, I am forced to listen to the song more often than I want. I think the lyrics are just plain stupid. If I was a woman, the last thing I’d ever want to be compared to is a brick house.

But it gets worse. I recently discovered that many historians and anthropologists believe that Amazon women routinely removed their right breast as part of a religious ritual that helped them hunt, allowing them to pull back on bow strings and throw javelins without their breast getting in the way. Though there is much debate over the veracity of this claim, the name Amazon is believed to have derived from the Greek word a-mazon, meaning “no breast.”

Read more about this here.

What does this have to do with Brick House and the Commodores?

Ironically, the Commodores sing about women’s breasts and Amazons in their song:

Yea she's a brick-house, that lady's stacked, And that's a fact, Ain't holdin' nothin back, oh she's a brick-house, Yeah she's the one, the only one, Built like an Amazon.

Whether or not Amazon women cut off one breast, I find it ironic and amusing that The Commodores would attempt to compare a woman’s breasts favorably to that of Amazon women, who may have purposely removed their breasts.

For one who truly hates the song as much as I do, I hope you take as much pleasure in this discovery as I did.

What is Hell?

The Devil believes that hell is a place where your greatest loves can be turned against you, so in my case…

Springsteen’s Thunder Road, over and over again for eternity.

But the Devil doesn’t know that I fall more in love with that song each time I hear it.

My name affords exponentially more options

Lynyrd Skynyrd was named after their PE teacher named Leonard Skinner.  The band chose the name in mocking tribute to Skinner’s enforcement of the hair length policy at their high school. I wonder what band name my former students might create in mocking tribute to my own name.

The encore is stupid.

Does anyone else find this social dance bizarre and insulting? The concert seemingly comes to an end, the band steps off stage, yet the lights in the theater remain low. There is an unspoken expectation between the band and the audience that regardless of the quality of the performance, the crowd will remain in their seats, making a requisite amount of noise in order to coax the band back on stage, despite the knowledge of all present that the musicians intend on returning regardless of the reaction of the fans.

I’m sure that there was a time when the encore was a legitimate act of audience appreciation, when a band would genuinely end their performance and head backstage, only to be inspired by a roaring crowd to return for one more number.

But this is no longer the case. Nowadays, bands save their most well known song for the encore, and even the lighting and pyrotechnics for an encore are preprogrammed, eliminating all illusion to the authenticity or spontaneity of the moment. In fact, performers often leave their instruments on stage during the encore, only removing them after the encore is complete. This contrived interplay between audience and performer is ridiculous and should end immediately.

This strikes me as similar to the silence that now reigns between movements in an orchestral performance.

False. Pretentious. Unnecessary. Stupid.