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This blew me away, but Jim Steinman, the guy who wrote Meatloaf’s "Bat Out of Hell" (later covered by Sammy Sosa), also penned the songs:
Then again, wouldn't "Total Eclipse of the Heart" exactly suit Meatloaf?
The non-vegetarian Loaf (who is actually a vegetarian) himself does a duet with Luciano Pavarotti, on the album Luciano Pavarotti & Friends Together for the Children of Bosnia.
No sign of Ellen Foley, though.
Does it strike anyone else as odd that telepathy is a psychic power, but television isn't?
If I wrote the dictionary....
UPDATE (1/15/04): "Telepathy cannot exist without the hearer and television without the seer"—Ramana Maharshi.
Since I moved into this apartment, once a month or so I have to fast-forward through a canned telemarketing message from a local moving company, that gets left on my answering machine.
It's always been from a guy with the thickest Russian accent ever: "Hello, this is Boris, and I am wondering if you, or anyone you know, are planning to be moving in the next thirty days," etc.
Today it's "message day" again, with the exact same script as always—except this time it's an English-accented bloke named "Reggie."
He signs off by saying, "Cheerio."
"Reggie" sounds suspiciously like someone who's just faking a British accent, though.
Is the Cold War still on?
"My name? Bond, James Bond."
I’ve been listening to Chris De Burgh (Best Of), and cannot help myself from expecting to hear the following modifications to the "Spanish Train" lyrics:
There's a Spanish train that runs between Guadalquivir and Aberdeen.... . . . Just then the Lord himself appeared in a blinding flash of light, And shouted at the Devil, "Get thee hence to endless night!!" But the Devil just grinned and said "I may have sinned, But you don’t have to raise your voice...." . . . Well the railwayman he cut the cards And he dealt them each a hand of five And for the Lord he was praying hard Or that train he'd have to drive....
Point of philosophy: Wouldn't praying to God while He's focused on a card game potentially distract him, thus risking him losing the game, and hence your soul? "Stop that noise! I'm trying to think, Goddammit!"
And far away from here, methinks The Lord and the Devil play tiddlywinks....
Next up: "Patricia the Stripper."
Fossil hunter Bruce Young's heart was racing as crumbly brown sandstone flaked away from buried bone to reveal the unmistakable horned skull of a triceratops.
"And the local cops, triceratops/Try to reach for the moment and make an honest stand"—Bruce 'Dinosaur' Springsteen, "Jungleland"
"As soon as we could see the outline of it, I said, 'Holy mackerel, I think we have a skull,'" Young said Monday, recalling last week's discovery of the dinosaur fossil at a home construction site west of Brighton.
"Bright amateur archaeologist fishes out skull of holy mackeral, claims divine insight."
"And once we found the horn, we really started to get excited," said Young, 51, a retired computer analyst who spends most weekends searching for the bones of long-dead beasts.
"Horny computer analyst digs beastiality. Film at eleven."
So I'm checking out used books on abebooks.com, and come across the following listing:
Swami Yogananda (Paramhansa Yogananda)
WHISPERS FROM ETERNITY: Universal Scientific Prayers and Poems
LA: Yogoda / Sat-Sanga, 1929. Good+ condition; extremities lightly rubbed; front cover very lightly damped, with loss of gilt from lotus decoration; bookplate. Presentation copy signed in 1932 by Self Realization Fellowship (Yogoda Sat Sanga Society) of America Vice Presidents Yogi Hamid Bey and Bramachari Nerode. 2nd Enlarged Edition. Binding is 12mo. Gilt-titled red cloth with lotus decoration on front cover, without dust jacket. Bookseller Inventory #195179
Price: US$ 602.50
That's what I need: to have my extremities lightly rubbed. A loss of gilt wouldn't hurt, either.
Well, my bass guitar gave me quite a scare last night.
Picked it up for the first time in far too long. Plucked a string.
No (amplified) sound.
Checked the cables, verified that my Strat produced sound through the same effects unit.
Fiddled with all the knobs on the guitar itself. Tried a different effects unit.
Nothing.
What could go wrong with the electronics inside a guitar?
With visions of having to take the axe back into Long & McQuade for them to find something which I already knew would be totally obvious, I took another look at the back of the guitar.
Hey, there's a little compartment here ... with a 9-Volt battery inside, which had evidently gone dead.
Still, a guitar being "electric" shouldn't mean that it needs batteries, should it?
Stumbled on an amazing blues CD recently: The James Cotton Blues Band, 35th Anniversary Jam.
The album has a version of "Rocket 88," which was, I've recently read, the very first ever Rock 'n Roll song. (It's about cars and girls. Go figure.)
I suppose there's probably some sexual symbolism to the whole "rocket" thing, but it's lost on me.
Of course, one must be prepared to overlook lines in other songs, such as:
You're like the cake in the oven You got me rising for your sweetness.... You my cookin' grease, baby On every fried meat you cook with your [unintelligible]....
Damn, now I'm hungry. For fried food and sweets, too.
My baby she got blue eyes Blue eyes and blue suede shoes Yeah my baby she got blue eyes Blue eyes and blue suede shoes Since my blue-eyed baby left me Got those blue-eyed baby blues My blue-eyed babe got pink-eye Gonna match her pink suede shoes Yeah my blue-eyed babe got pink-eye Gonna match her pink suede shoes Since my blue-eyed babe went pink on me Got those pink-eyed baby blues My baby took the red-eye When her pink eye starts to ooze Yeah my baby took the red-eye When her pink eye starts to ooze Caught me with a green-eyed baby Got those red-eye baby blues
Or, as Wendell Ferguson once put it:
When you play the blues you always repeat the first line Yeah when you play the blues you always repeat the first line That's why the blues are so easy—you only gotta think of one rhyme
Wendell's even more infamous poem:
Mary had a little skirt Was slit right up the side And everywhere that Mary went The boys could see her thighs Mary had another skirt Was slit right up the front....
Made an interesting discovery today: the left hand area of the upper shelf in the door of my fridge can actually hold four beers. I had been under the impression, since I moved in, that it could only hold three.
I intend to celebrate by drinking one of them. ("And then there were three....")
Also, noticed that David Bowie's Aladdin Sane, which I just have out of the library, contains a cover of the Rolling Stones' "Let's Spend the Night Together."
Surely this must hearken back to the afternoon when Bianca Jagger came home from shopping to find Mick and David in bed together.
Not drinking beer.
Erectile Tissue Found in Octopus "Fingers"
Researchers said yesterday they had found erectile tissue in the tentacle of a male octopus, the first time such tissue has been seen in an invertebrate.
"Invertebrate gets boner in tentacles," claim excited scientists.
Joseph Thompson, assistant professor of biology at Saint Joseph's University in Philadelphia and Janet Voight of the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago published their discovery in the Journal of Zoology.
Joseph Thompson ... Saint Joseph's ... probably just a coincidence.
In most octopus males, the tip of one of their eight arms is used to pass spermatophores, little packages filled with sperm, to females during mating. Thompson and Voight found the extra modification in one species of shallow-water octopus.
I'd like to be Under the sea In an Octopus's Garden with you
Thompson, who called the finding weird, said biologists have looked for erectile tissue in other molluscs but not found them.
Have they tried other species too? "'Erectile tissue found in chicken fingers,' claim excited scientists." "It's a hard job," said semenologist Dr. Janet Bradley, tossing back some of the fried delicacies in a sports bar after work, "but somebody's gotta do it."
Octopuses, known for their intelligence and complex behaviour, are shy animals. Observing their mating is difficult and often the females attack and eat the males during courtship.
I'm happy here Just drinking beer In a bachelor apartment, sans you
In fact, it was while watching a female turn on a male who was attempting to mate with her that Voight made the discovery. The male hurriedly withdrew his tentacle —"because the female was probably eyeing him up as lunch," Thompson said.
"I withdraw my tentacle, Your Honor. Speaking of 'your honor' ... wanna have lunch?"
"She noticed the tip of the arm was swollen. It was distended," he said in a telephone interview.
"Hey, is that a weird swelling on your arm ... or are you just happy to see me?"
Thompson had noticed that, under a microscope, the tissue at the end of the copulatory tentacle looked like mammalian erectile tissue. They put two and two together.
Well, two and two's company, three and three's a crowd ... what's eight and eight? Sweet sixteen.
"We haven't gotten a male octopus to perform for us, as it were, in the lab," Thompson admitted. "Maybe we should try Viagra."
"We"? Wouldn't it be better to give the Viagra to the octopus? Or does the octopus just enjoy watching? "Oh, Joe!" "Oh, Janet!" "Look, the octopus is getting erect! Wrap your arms around me!" "All eight of them?" "No, just two." "I love you, dammit, Janet!" "I love you too, Brad!" "Joe!! My name's Joe!" "Oh, I'm ... sorry. The octopus suit threw me off. It reminds me of a guy I used to be engaged to." "Hmpf!" "I'm really sorry, Doctor Thompson. Here, give me your tentacles...."
Why would an octopus need to have an erection? Perhaps for some of the same reasons that other animals have them.
"Erectile tissue might be a way to have a large copulatory organ when it is in use," Thompson said. When not in use, it would be small and out of the way. "Running around with an erection potentially could be difficult."
Tell me about it.
To borrow a phrase from Ted Nugent ("Wang Dang, Sweet Poontang") and James Bond: "This one's for all that Aqua World Octopussy!"
Was paying my phone bill today, and noticed a charge on it for a long-distance plan which I had no idea I was signed up for.
So I've been paying an extra $8 a month for a service which I have used not even once, and would never have signed up for in any even remotely-sober state. (The Pink Floyd defense: "I don't know, I was really drunk at the time.")
The moral of which is, I suppose, to actually read your bills before paying them, as this must have been going on since I moved into this apartment, ten months ago.
So "Amanda" at Bell Customer Service was anxious to "provide me with excellent service today" (heh-heh-heh). She sounded cute, too.
"Phone sex from a Bell Canada Customer Service rep"—the irony would be almost unbearable! "Is that a cell phone in your pocket, or ... ooh! Yes, I accept your long-distance charges, big boy!"
(She was tryna upsell me to a cell phone which I would also have no use for, see.)
Granted, it was early in the day, but she was still way too pleasant for someone who has, let's face it, one of the worst jobs on the face of the planet (i.e., Customer Service in general).
Being so chronically cheerful in dealing with upset customers for 7.5 hours every weekday must really bring out the shadow part of your psyche in your off hours, though, don't you think? I mean, if you get paid to be cheery, how would you want to do it on evenings and weekends?
But then, we're all prostitutes in one way or another, n'est ce pas?
Has anyone else noticed that Elvis Presley's personal physician and chief drug-prescriber was named Dr. Nichopoulos, from which we have The Simpsons' "Dr. Nick"?
Of course, Lisa Simpson's middle name is Marie, from Lisa Marie Presley. And Marge's maiden name was Bouvier, cf. Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy.
When Homer took to managing Lurleen Lumpkin, he styled himself as "Colonel Homer," implicitly after Presley's own manager and former carnival barker, Colonel Tom Parker, who helped himself to 50% of Elvis' gross earnings.
I suppose it's just "life imitating art" that the guy who helped the Chicago Cubs lose out to the Marlins in the playoffs this year by interfering with a foul-but-catchable fly ball was named "Bartman." D'oh!
You remember the old "Eight is Great" ditty from Sesame Street?
Eight, eight, eight is great Eight is the number I cannot ... Wait! Important news comes from the queen A new baby and I have seen That she is well and doing fine Good grief, it's princess number nine
King Henry VIII. Kept beheading his wives 'cause they would only bear daughters to him.
Second verse, same as the first.
Oh, and don't miss out on the Ozzy Osbourne action figure. (The hands should really have battery-operated tremors, though.)
What always cracks me up is remembering what a journalist wrote in the Toronto Star months ago, about watching "The Osbournes" on TV, and thinking to himself, "You know, that Ozzy's a pretty good father."
Was doing some photocopying at Kinko's tonight, and saw that they already have their Christmas tree out.
Geez, the zombie bodies from Halloween aren't even cold yet.
Anyway, I'm still waiting for Halloween VIII: Jason Meets Henry to premiere....
