For some reason, “In A Big Country” popped into my head.
No.
I don’t know why.
These things just happen, OK?
As I usually do when a catchy tune burrows its way into my skull, I clicked open iTunes. You can get the song on the Big Country album, The Best of Big Country.
The Best of Big Country.
Is Big Country a band that is worthy of a “Best Of” compilation?
Is it just that one song over and over again — because that’s the only Big Country song I’m even vaguely aware of.
Can you become addicted to a song?
I’m not talking about a song that gets stuck in your head, but a song that you feel compelled to listen to over and over again. When it stops you hit play and start it again. Over and over and over and over.
I’m in that mode right now with You Belong To Me by the Doobie Brothers, lead vocals by Michael McDonald.
23 plays and counting.
They are playing Christmas music pretty much nonstop at the office. I know, I know. Everybody is probably dealing with this in their workplace. Honestly, it doesn’t bother me much if it’s the classics.
But the other day, while walking past the front desk, I heard Dan Fogelberg’s “Same Old Lang Syne” — a song that never struck me as a “Christmas” song — seeing as its only connection is that it takes place on Christmas Eve.
For those of you unfamiliar with the song — and for the purposes of this post I’m going to make a fairly safe assumption that Fogelberg is writing about himself seeing as he refers to being on tour and playing music — he runs into an old lover in the grocery store and the two are talking and eventually go outside and share a drink and talk about old times. The woman tells him that she married an architect but its a loveless marriage and he tells her that the work is tough but that the audience makes it worthwhile.
It ends with the two leaving after sharing the drink, and they go their separate ways, back to their lives.
Last night I was thinking, what if this really happened? What if Fogelberg’s in the store, sees this woman, they share a drink and talk and they go on about their business?
Let’s say the woman goes home, grocery bags in hand and her architect husband asks why she was gone so long. She tells him that she met an old friend at the store, Dan Fogelberg, you know, the singer, and they shared a drink before she came home.
He says that’s great and goes on about his business, perhaps kissing her on the cheek.
Flash forward a year or so, the two are going to visit family for the holidays, the radio playing and she hears a new song from her friend and turns up the volume. About halfway through the opening verse she realizes what it is and starts to get nervous, her husband halfway listening.
She tries to reach toward the knob, her husband asking as her hand moves that way, “Hey, isn’t this that friend of yours? The Fogelberg guy?”
Right then the line comes out of the speaker, “She said she’d married her an architect, he kept her warm and safe and dry. She would have liked to say she loved the man, but she didn’t like to lie.”
Man, imagine the silence in that car.
Awkward.
I sat in shocked horror last night as the Baltimore Ravens, which had been pestering and pounding New England Patriots QB Tom Brady all night, inexplicably, with the game on the line and the chance to unseat what the East Coast media has crowned “TEH GREATEST TEAM EVAR!!!” stopped.
They just flat out wussed it up and started dropping eight guys into coverage which gave Brady — oh, about a freaking year, to throw the ball.
I kept rocking back and forth muttering, “Don’t rush three, don’t rush three, don’t rush three,” over and over again and they’d snap the ball, five guys would block three and they went right down the field.
Fourth down, Brady gets blown up — oh, the Ravens called timeout. Fourth down again, the play gets blown up — oh the Pats false start. Fourth down AGAIN, and six — they bring three and Brady takes a leisurely stroll for the first down.
It was nightmarish.
And because the Ravens DC just choked and played wuss ball, we have to continue to hear about the Patriots are a team of destiny and how Brady probably went back in time, invented football, had sex with Eve to “begat” himself and then traveled to the future to solve the Middle East crisis.
I really, really hate the Patriots.
HATE.
A solid week of using Flock and there are definite hitches.
Sometimes it inexplicably just won’t connect to sites. Open up other browsers and everything works perfectly.
A restart fixes the issue, but I don’t want my workhorse browser to work sometimes, I want it to work all the time.
So, Flock won’t load everything, Firefox eats memory until it crashes and Safari won’t work well with Wordpress.
Well, isn’t that great….
I am, by nature, a tinkerer.
I love playing with different software, testing things out, trying to find a better way to do what I do.
I was an alpha tester on IE4 — it ate my computer. Well, some things never change.
After becoming increasingly irritated with the instability of Firefox, Safari’s inability to properly compose posts for the site and an oddity in which after a few hours it would refuse to load CNN.com, I went looking for something new and stumbled across Flock which bills itself as a “social web browser” with the ability to tie in Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and Youtube.
The way it does RSS feeds is nice, and this is a test of how well it integrates with the blog. It seems fast, responsive and generally is pretty groovy to look at.
I haven’t even scratched the surface of some of the bells and whistles it has, but if you are a tinkerer, it might be worth a shot.
Blogged with Flock
We had a bad headline in today’s paper. And by bad, I mean boring.
It was technically right, but missed the entire point.
I used the example with my staff of Star Wars.
If you were writing a headline for the first Star Wars movie, would you use “Farm boy moves out of uncle’s house”?
I mean, technically, it’s right. But yeah…kinda misses the whole blows up the Death Star thing.
