Songs Inspired by Literature
What the title says… I have to admit, I didn’t realize how many songs I know are based on literary works.
Mad Tea Party
From Alice in Wonderland:
The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was, “Why is a raven like a writing-desk?”
“Come, we shall have some fun now!” thought Alice. “I’m glad they’ve begun asking riddles.–I believe I can guess that,” she added aloud.
“Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the March Hare.
“Exactly so,” said Alice.
“Then you should say what you mean,” the March Hare went on.
“I do,” Alice hastily replied; “at least–at least I mean what I say–that’s the same thing, you know.”
“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Hatter. “You might just as well say that ‘I see what I eat’ is the same thing as ‘I eat what I see’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the March Hare, “that ‘I like what I get’ is the same thing as ‘I get what I like’!”
“You might just as well say,” added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, “that ‘I breathe when I sleep” is the same thing as ‘I sleep when I breathe’!”
“It is the same thing with you,” said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn’t much.
Things my girlfriend and I have argued about.com
A British guy, a German girl, a couple of kids and some serious lack of communication. Also, a fascinating story about how the British tabloid the Daily Mail stole the website and printed it in their Sunday edition with all the names changed, and actually thought they might get away with it. They didn’t.
The End of the World
Check out this Flash movie. Fucking kangaroos.
U.S. Ancestry Maps
This is pretty cool — U.S. maps that show dispersion of people of various ancestry. Interesting where all the people of German ancestry tend to live… in the midwest. Check out the Irish; they all live in Kentucky and Tennessee.
Most Interesting Theatrical Synopsis
Salon magazine reviews an underground, possibly illegal, play staged in New York, entitled “I’m Going to Kill the President.” The plot, which sounds quite fun, is this (quoted from Salon):
The plot, such as it is, centers around Skip, a revolutionary who’s bereaved after his girlfriend, Bess, handcuffs herself to a Southern senator and sets off a suicide bomb in a posh Washington restaurant. (When he objects, she cries, “Don’t go Gandhi on me now!”) He’s played by an amazingly quick, dolefully funny actor whose name, like everyone else’s in the show, is redacted in the program.
Dejected and on the lam, Skip meets NYU student Fifi at an Identity Fair, where she’s shopping for a new persona. Alternately sarcastic and bubbleheaded, she coos, “I’ve never met a real revolutionary before,” to which he responds, “Well, it’s a word used only in advertising, and even then incorrectly.”
Soon, she’s signed on to his plan to kidnap the president, igniting so much chaos in the country that the United Nations, also known as the Superfriends, will be forced to intervene and install a “puppet democracy,” as it has in various other nations troubled by “corrupt regimes” and “screwy elections.”
Skip and Fifi set off on an insurrectionary picaresque, meeting a violent, armless veteran of Gulf War I, a group of activists driven to sectarian meltdown by the challenges of ordering a pizza, Fifi’s “edgy, arty” ex-boyfriend, and Ralph Nader. They are dogged by a feral green sleeping bag that attacks the politically uncommitted, turning them into reactionary zombies, and by the Man, who tries to steal Fifi’s heart with fantasies of bourgeois comfort.
Threaded throughout are all kinds of genius low-tech gags and humor that alternates between bleak deadpan and manic physical comedy. There’s a tour-de-force three-way phone call between a cop, the dean of NYU and the head of Homeland Security in which BANG plays all the parts and, toward the end, a repeat of an early scene entirely in French. Like the bastard child of Valerie Solanas and Mel Brooks, BANG combines an astonishing talent for fleet-footed physical humor and rapid-fire repartee with a kamikaze downtown nihilism.
I think it’s the feral green sleeping bag that grabs my imagination.
Iraq Never Had Nuclear Weapons Program After 1991
According to records made available to The Washington Post and interviews with arms investigators from the United States, Britain and Australia, it did not require a comprehensive survey to find the central assertions of the Bush administration’s prewar nuclear case to be insubstantial or untrue. Although Hussein did not relinquish his nuclear ambitions or technical records, investigators said, it is now clear he had no active program to build a weapon, produce its key materials or obtain the technology he needed for either.
Rock in Tree (Gobbler’s Rock)
In Yellowwood State Forest, there’s a giant limestone boulder in a tree. Back in 2001, I went looking for this, because I had heard of it on RoadsideAmerica.com.
A refrigerator sized limestone rock, 40 feet high in a tree. This 1,000 pound wonder sways with the wind way up in an oak tree in the Yellow Wood state forest in southern Indiana. Did it rise with the tree’s growth? Artistic vandals? No one knows… A great excuse for a walk in the woods.
At that time, there wasn’t a photo of it on the site, so I was going to get one myself. I wandered around in the woods following the directions for several hours and ran across several hunters and horseback riders, but I never found the rock.
Since then, someone posted GPS directions on Roadside America, and now here’s a whole article about the mysterious boulders.
I have asked others that live there in Bloomington about this, and it turns out many have seen it. How something that large could have got there is unknown to me (my guess is a tornado). I had my GPS and recorded the location: GPS N 39*12.604, W 086*22.314.
Update: Apparently in 2006, the tree fell.
Update: Mystery author Terence Faherty published a short story called “No Mystery” based on the rock in the tree in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in April 2011 and in a short story collection called Tales of the Star Republic. In the story he gives the most plausible explanation of how the rocks got up in the tree. I won’t spoil the answer for you; you should read it for yourself.
Beware: A Deadly Foe Is Near…
And other strange things that you can communicate with flowers.
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