Category: silliness

tweet, tweet, tweet (and a few other bird songs)

Yesterday’s bird-themed list was remarkably lacking in musical references. Which is a shame, because many birds sing so very musically. And apparently inspire so much singing. So, I offer up a supplemental bird song list.

Bird Songs

Three Little Birds, Bob Marley
The Littlest Birds, The Be Good Tanyas
Wonder of Birds, Innocence Mission
King of Birds, REM
Bird on the Wire, Leonard Cohen
Blackbird on the Wire, The Beautiful South
Blackbird the Beatles
Blue Jay Way, the Beatles
Cuckoo, Kristin Hersh
Kookaburra, Marion Sinclair
Rockin’ Robin, Bobby Day
Mockingbird, by Eminem
Parrot Polynesia, Shonen Knife
The Peacock Song, Bif Naked
Fly Like an Eagle, the Steve Miller Band
Free Bird, Lynard Skynard
And Your Bird Can Sing, the Beatles
Canary in a Coalmine, The Police
Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, Tom Lehrer

And in case you were expecting some more creative song titles, I refer you to this list someone put together a couple of years back, which offers up A whiter shade of quail and Wren drops keep falling on my hen.

for the birds

Chirp, cheep, tweet. This week’s theme for things is birds. The feathers are flying. Suspect fowl play.

  • 10,000 Birds:
    A blog of many birds, though I haven’t counted them. This month’s Carnival of Color, where my green guys have gone to hang out, is graciously being hosted by 10,000 Birds.
  • The Birds (1963)
    Alfred Hitchcock’s thriller of birds on the attack.
  • Eat like a bird:
    An expression that means “eat small amounts.” Of course, actual birds can be seen to eat constantly, and consume large proportions of their body weight each day.
  • Birds of a feather stick together:
    A saying meaning that like-minded people tend to associate with each other. Happily, there’s no actual sticking together, with feathers. Because that would be messy.
  • My little chickadee:
    This is a nickname that my mother had for my sister and me, her little chickadees. Also the title of a 1940 movie. Apparently was a catch phrase of W. C. Field’s.
  • Phoebe:
    Okay, my favorite Phoebe is not actually a bird, but a small person. With no feathers. But phoebes, such as the Eastern Phoebe, are birds. With feathers and everything.
  • The Raven, by Edgar Allen Poe
    The famous poem. (Features the name Lenore, too, which is a family name. Most recently in use as a middle name by my own little Phoebe bird.)

    Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe, and forget this lost Lenore!’
    Quoth the raven, `Nevermore.’

  • Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. The Adult Swim cartoon. (Not actually a bird, but a guy who dresses in a bird-like costume. Complete with wings.)

    Once a third-rate superhero, Harvey Birdman is now a third-rate lawyer trying like hell to get by in a fancy law firm. It’s not clear whether Harvey actually went to law school, but he definitely knows the things to say to sound like a lawyer. And he has a suit now, that’s for sure.

  • Woodsy Owl
    A mascot for the United States Forest Service. “Give a hoot. Don’t pollute.”

    • woodstock.gif

  • The Golden Goose:
    A fairy tale about a goose with feathers of gold.

    • We have several yellow birds that bear little resemblance to actual yellow birds:

  • Big Bird, of Sesame Street. Large, yellow, feathered.
  • Woodstock, of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts. Small feathered friend of Snoopy.
  • Tweety Bird, the Looney Tunes bird.
    He tought he taw a putty tat.
  • There are also heaps o’ ducks, chickens and penguins. I could easily make a list about each of those. Maybe I will at some point. But for now, lets say…Daffy, The Little Red Hen and Opus.

    • This bird list could go on and on, but I’ll stop there for now.

    I’m a word freak, don’t you know

    A few weeks back I wrote a post in which I claimed that some posts a few folks wrote (for a meme) had used too much of a thing. Too much, in fact, to fit the name they’d used for that meme. So I wrote a post of my own, played that same game, and stuck to the rule.

    Well, I had fun with that post. I had to choose my words with care. And then I thought it might be hard to write a whole post that way. But I thought I’d give it a try. It’s not as hard as I thought. As I sit here, I can find quite a lot of words to use. (The sad thing is, I can’t name the thing, the rule, since to tell you would break that “one” rule of this post. You’ll have to guess what it is. Or in case it’s not clear, just go back to that old post. )

    Since I may find it hard to write with much depth, as I find that there is a tense or two that I can’t use, I think I’ll tell a tale. Here goes.

    There was once a young girl who loved words. She loved to say them, write them, and play with them like toys. She’d bounce them, flip them, or squish them up. She liked to roll them off her tongue.

    She could talk all day, and use lots and lots of words. But the sad thing was, she did not have much to say. At least not much that was worth while. Most of what she said made no sense at all.”Truck, muck, shoe, socks!” she would say to her dog. “Boo, blue, too, true,” she’d tell her mom. “Dude, prude, dance, pants” she’d shout to the man at the store. All day long, words would pour out of her mouth. Lots of words, short words. But not much sense. Blah, blah, blah, blah, she might as well have said.

    One day as she was on her way home from school, she saw a strange red cat. She stopped to have a look at the way the bright red fur shone in the sun. As was her way, she spat out some words of no sense. “Bird, turd, drop, fraught,” she sang.

    “What do you mean by that?” asked the cat.

    Kate, for that was the girl’s name, paused. She had not known that cats could talk. “Cow, crow, coo, phlegm,” she said, once her first shock had passed.

    “Why do you talk like that? I don’t get it,” The cat said.

    “Hmmpf,” Kate said. “Well, I’m not sure. I know I like to play with words, though,” she told the cat. (For she could make some sense when she chose to.) “It’s fun. Roof, tooth, duck, shale.”

    “Oh,” said the cat. “I see what you mean.” He thought for a bit and said: “Flip, trip, burp, plow.”

    Kate smiled. “Scoop, stoop, tree, sine,” she said right back. And the two of them walked off hand in hand.

    The end.

    “Wait,” you say. “Cats don’t have hands.” Well, that’s true. But I made the rest of it up, too. So there.

    One last thing. Can you give a thought as to how to end this phrase:
    Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their _____.

    ants in my pants

    Yesterday was the 4th of July. A rather straightforward statement to make on the 5th of July. But, as you likely know, the Fourth of July is also the way most people refer to the US holiday officially called ant_bunch_sm.jpgIndependence Day. This holiday is often celebrated with parades, fireworks, barbecues and picnics. In fact, yesterday we managed to pull of a picnic of sorts at a nearby park. And in the great tradition of outdoor eating, we did get visited by some ants.

    In honor of picnics, I bring you some ants.ant_sm11.jpg

      them02.jpg

    1. A Bug’s Life (1998)
      The Pixar animated movie about bugs. A sort of retelling of the Seven Samurai, but with bugs. (Also a bit like ¡Three Amigos!, but with bugs.) ant_sm2.jpgThe main character is an ant, voiced by Dave Foley, who seeks help to save his ant colony from bullying grasshoppers.
    2. Antz (1998)
      1998 was clearly the year for animated ant features. This Dreamworks one was more adult-oriented and had the voice of Woody Allen.
    3. Them (1954)
      A movie featuring giant mutant ants.
    4. The Ants Go Marching, a children’s counting song, to the tune of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home”

      The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah
      The ants go marching one by one, hurrah, hurrah
      The ants go marching one by one,
      The little one stops to suck his thumb
      And they all go marching down to the ground
      To get out of the rain
      boom, boom, boom

      5. ant_sm3.jpg

    5. The ant from “High Hopes,” sung by Frank Sinatra:

      Just what makes that little old ant
      Think he’ll move that rubber tree plant
      Anyone knows an ant can’t
      Move a rubber tree plant

      But he’s got high hopes, he’s got high hopes
      He’s got high apple pie in the sky hopes

      6. ants_in_line_sm1.jpg

    6. Dance Ants
      A video that someone put together to Fall Out Boy’s “Dance, Dance”. It’s pretty random, but I found it funny. Especially the textual re-interpretation of the original lyrics, like “these are the gloves you’d love to eat”. And yes, the video does have some ants. That dance.
    7. ants in your pants
      An expression. Someone with ants in their pants is so wound up they can’t keep still. A popular reference in songs, like in “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” by Rodgers and Hart, a song sung by many, including the amazing Ella Fitzgerald:

      Romance, finis. your chance, finis.
      Those ants that invaded my pants, finis.
      Bewitched, bothered and bewildered – no more

      Or “I got ants in my pants,” by James Brown (hear it here)

      ‘Cause I can’t dance,
      I can’t dance,
      I got ants in my pants,
      Got ants in my pants,
      Now, I can’t dance, ant_2sm1.jpg
      I can’t dance,
      Got ants in my pants!
      Got ants in my pants!

    8. Want to see some real ants? You can see lots of them in time-lapsed videos through the wonder of YouTube. Like ants eating ant poison, or 7 minutes of ants eating a dropped piece of food, or a variety of ants in action in ant farms.

    ants_in_line_sm2.jpg

    the weekly pants

    After my most recent post of seriousness, and being too tired/sleep-deprived just now to put together coherent thoughts, I feel compelled to return to our regularly scheduled silliness. And what could be sillier than pants?

    I also feel that while this blog boasts more posts on pants that the average blog, I can do better. I’m sure I can bring you more pants. With that goal in mind, I’ll try to post on a pants topic once a week. I won’t commit to a day. I’ll just surprise you with pants some day each week, out of the blue. Pants! And besides, every day of the week should be pants day.

    To get the pants rolling (can pants roll?), I’ll share a tidbit from a lovely book called Unfortunate English: The Gloomy Truth Behind the Words You Use, by Bill Brohaugh. This book, given to me by the friend who was recently brave enough to be one of our house guests, contains some very entertaining etymological goods. According to Unfortunate English, pants are “a garment that has its origins in buffoonery and farce:”

    The word traces back to commedia dell’ arte, an old Italian theatre form (beginning in the 1500s) combining improvisation and standard bits actors could weave in at appropriate moments. One of the stock characters in this theatre form was Pantalone, a mean, miserly merchant and a bit of a dirty old man.[…]

    The Pantalone character wore tight-fitting trousers or leggings. Trousers like those worn by Pantalone were called pantaloons in the 1600s, and by the 1700s the word was applied to trousers (as opposed to knee breeches) in general. By the mid-1830s, the word had been shortened to pants… (p. 75)

    Another point made by the author is that because of the associations with the dirty old man Pantalone character, a comic figure, the term pantaloons has roots in “making light of old folk:”

    …by the 1600s the word pantaloon meant “old codger.” (p. 76)

    It’s interesting to see how pantaloon’s descendent pants has matured, having now lost this meaning of mockery of the matured.

    iPhone: good features, but falls short of design expectations

    As some of you know, we are very much a pro-Mac household. Also, John is more than a bit of a technophile. So it shouldn’t come as much surprise that John wanted to get one of the new Apple iPhones as soon as possible. John camped out for most of the afternoon today outside a nearby phone store, and we were lucky enough to get our hands on one of the coveted, ultra-cool, ultra-sleek iPhones.

    The iPhone has been awaited with great anticipation for years, long before it was officially announced by Apple. But since Apple released details and images of the iPhone, with its large high-res LCD and touch-pad with multi-touch operating, and versatile phone + camera + video player + music player + internet ready identities, it has been creating quite the buzz.

    We were, naturally, quite eager to see whether the iPhone could live up to the hype. Since some of you may not have had a chance to see the iPhone in action yet, aside from in the commercials, we thought we’d share our own experiences and impressions.

    When we got ours home, John opened up the box.

    in_box_sm1.jpg

    As advertised, all he needed to do was plug it into the computer, and go through iTunes in order to activate it.

    with_dock_sm1.jpg

    Also as advertised, the iPhone not only shows images, but it can also function as a music player:

    music1.jpg

    The iPhone is easy to navigate, with handy built-in scrolling features:

    scrolling_sm1.jpg

    While much of the functionality has been very cool, the design of the phone itself is surprisingly clunky: with big plastic buttons, and a screen that’s a bit smaller than we’d hoped. The sound quality of the music is a bit tinny, and somewhat annoying with various boingy and chirping sounds jumping in unexpectedly, and the selection of songs you can listen to is quite limited. While I do like the way the brightly colored lights flash when I push the buttons, I haven’t yet figured out how to dial the phone, as there are only buttons for 1 through 4. Most distressingly, we have already encountered at least three bugs with the iPhone, which are obvious in the image below.¹

    in_hand_noted1.jpg

    Has Apple fallen down in its standards?

    ————-

    ¹ And not just bugs: a frog, a bird and a duck, too.

    visitor stats

    a shocking excess of syllables

    I stumbled across a couple of meme-like posts last night that sparked both my interest and my concern. First this one, which referenced this one. The task described on the blog icedmocha was to:

    Answer all thirty-five questions using only one word. It’s harder than it looks. Give it a try on your blog.

    An interesting challenge. A provocative proposition. The particpants I read (the first two I saw, plus this third one) had come up with some fantastic single-word responses.

    The problem? The posts, and apparently the meme, are entitled “Monosyllabic.” In spite of this, I witnessed a large number of polysyllabic words. Shocking, shocking. As someone who spends portions of her professional time finding syllables, hunting them down and tracking them in the wild, I felt it my duty to round up some bonafide monosyllables of my own.

    1. Where is your cell phone?     bag

    2. Relationship?     yes

    3. Your hair?     brown

    4. Work?     sounds

    5. Your sister?     cool

    6. Your favorite thing?     sleep

    7. Your dream last night?     strange

    8. Your favorite drink?     ale

    9. Your dream car?     Peel’s

    10. The room you’re in?     den

    11. Your shoes?     docs

    12. Your fears?     war

    13. What do you want to be in 10 years?     prof

    14. Who did you hang out with this weekend?     Phoebs

    15. What you’re not good at?     hate

    16. Muffin?     please!

    17. One of your wish list items?     trip

    18. Where you grew up?     earth

    19. The last thing you did?     work

    20. What are you wearing?     pants

    21. What aren’t you wearing?     socks

    22. Your pet?     gone

    23. Your computer?     mac

    24. Your life?     whole

    25. Your mood?     calm

    26. Missing?     Red

    27. What are you thinking about right now?     words

    28. Your car?     gray

    29. Your kitchen?     mess

    30. Your summer?     short

    31. Your favorite color?     blue

    32. When is the last time you laughed?     noon

    33. Last time you cried?     days

    34. School?     grad

    35. Love?     John

    There we go. 35 monosyllables that are more-or-less true responses. Another challenging task would be to come up with monomorphemic responses to those same questions. Or to come up with 35 questions, the answers to which could all be pants.

    monosyllabic1.jpg
    A view of a production of the polysyllabic monosyllabic, displayed in Praat, with approximate syllabification into 5 syllables marked. (No commitment to the affiliation of potentially ambisyllabic consonants intended.)

    pants1.jpg
    A view of a production of the monosyllabic pants, displayed in Praat, with syllabification into 1 syllable marked.

    the case of the 54 million dollar pants

    This is a tale of a man who loved and lost. He had pants. He loved them. He cared for them. Then in a brutal act of dry cleaning, he lost his beloved pants. “Vengence will be mine!” he cried to the heavens. Setting himself up against the drycleaners who had so wronged him, he decided to sue the pants off them.

    But the cruel fates and crueler legal system failed him:

    A judge in the District of Columbia has dismissed a case against a dry cleaner who was sued for $54 million in damages over a pair of missing pants.

    Roy L. Pearson, an administrative law judge, originally sought $67 million from the Chung family, owners of Custom Cleaners. He claimed they lost a favorite pair of his suit trousers and later tried to give him a pair that were not his.

    Man, he must really have loved those pants.

    When the drycleaners tried to pull up some other man’s pants, and pass those phony pants off as his own, he was not swayed. When they tried to offer him payment for replacement pants, he was not mollified.

    Over the course of the litigation, the Chungs said they made three settlement offers — $3,000, then $4,600, then $12,000 — all rejected.

    He demanded satisfaction. The satisfaction that the drycleaners so boldly guaranteed on their front sign. He refused to drop his pants suit.

    What price freedom? What price pants?

    Thanks for sharing this, jenny. You have become a remarkable source of pants. And thanks, John, for sending me this other article.

    all you need is “dude”

    Late last week, jen of one plus two wrote an in-depth discussion of an important and versatile word of our times: dude. In that post, she suggested that if I were writing that post, I would include a list of song titles with the word dude. I took this as a challenge.¹ But being really, really freakin’ tired, it’s taken me a few days to get up off my metaphorical butt and figuratively rise to the challenge.

    When I read her suggestion, the first song that popped into my head was the Beatles’ classic “hey, dude”. Following along with this, I bring to you a selection of dude songs from those fab four dudes.

    1. hey, dude
    2. baby you’re a rich dude
    3. love me dude
    4. I wanna be your dude
    5. dizzy dude Lizzy
    6. nowhere dude
    7. Norwegian dude
    8. with a little help from my dudes
    9. Martha my dude
    10. can’t buy me dude
    11. you’ve got to hide your dude away
    12. a hard dude’s night
    13. the dude on the hill
    14. why don’t we dude it in the road
    15. ob-la-di, ob-la-dude
    16. eight dudes a week

    —-
    ¹ jen also offered a more direct challenge: for commenters to use the word dude in a haiku. My own dude haiku, which featured somewhat traditional references to nature, made me laugh. But it was late at night.