A Smal Bit of Music Humor

I’ve been eating my Thursday lunch at Taco Bueno the past few weeks. Last week, the piped-in music was cutting in and out so much that they finally just turned it off (right before I was about to ask them to do so myself). This week, the music was evidently still not working, so I ate my meal in complete silence.

My order number for this silent lunch? 433.

A Quick Holiday Quiz

How can you tell that Christmas is coming?

1) Colder temperatures.
2) Carols playing over the piped-in music at the mall.
3) Starbucks starts using the red cups.
4) You hear oboes playing "Deck the Halls" in the adjacent practice room.
5) All of the above, but you'd prefer to avoid #2 and #4 as much as possible.

Parents Say the Darnedest Things

(I don't have proof of parentage, of course, so the speaker could have been an aunt, a much older sister or even a babysitter...but go with me on this.) Walking through the local outdoor mall with a friend a few hours ago, we overheard a young woman trying to encourage a toddler to walk both faster and in a straight line by saying, "C'mon, tiny human!"

Nephews Say the Darnedest Things

My oldest one posed an interesting question at dessert time last night...

NEPHEW: Which would you rather have--ice cream with wasabi sauce, or chili with orange juice?
SISTER: How much orange juice?
NEPHEW: Lots!

Feel free to comment with your own answer...

Adults Say the Darnedest Things

As I was teaching lessons at the home studio tonight, the doorbell rang a few minutes before the next kid usually arrives. I had the kid who was finishing up his lessons continue to play as I answered the door.

But it wasn't the next kid; it was a lady that I had never seen before.

ME: Hi, can I help you?
LADY: Oh, that's just beautiful! What is that sound?
ME: It's a saxophone.
LADY: That's so nice. I'm just in the neighborhood seeing if you'd like to have your rugs shampooed. (Hesitates a second, still listening to saxophone.) And that's your doorbell? It's still going?
ME: No ma'am, that's someone playing saxophone, and I'm teaching him a lesson right now.
LADY (looks embarrassed): Oh, I see. But that sound really is beautiful!

They Were Targeting Unsuspecting Customers

I own a red polo, and I do all my grocery shopping at Target. Needless to say, I don't wear the former when doing the latter (never mind that the employees wear T-shirts now, not polos). But it's funny to see people pretending to work there and customers falling for it.

My New Favorite Viral Video Series

OK, this stuff has evidently been around since March, but I just heard about it today, and I think it's great. I'm talking about the video series known as "Auto-Tune the News."

So what is Auto-Tune, and how is it applied to the news? This article from the website Politico describes it thusly:

With his mashup of news, music and video called “Auto-Tune the News,” Michael Gregory is taking political satire into the digital era. “Auto-Tune the News” is the brainchild of Gregory, 24, and his two brothers and sister-in-law. Using the software program Auto-Tune (which is used by musicians — like Cher — to simulate perfect pitch) and a green screen (which places one image on top of another in a video, as in weather forecasts) they’ve produced six videos — which have been viewed at least 6 million times.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/25578.html#ixzz0Mzw2k5hp

Want to make it six million and one? Check out the latest one:



(I should point out that Politico needs a better phrase to describe the Auto-Tune software; it doesn't simulate "perfect pitch," which is the ability to hear a note and know what it is. Perfect intonation, maybe? But I bet if you called it "that thing in the Cher song," everyone would know what you were talking about.)

It is interesting to listen to the sing-song cadence of the various speakers whose words have been adapted and realize that it probably didn't take much effort to turn their speech into song. And it appears that, unlike a lot of political satire, ATTN seems to be embraced by its subjects/victims, many of whom embrace the notion of being included in one of the videos. As the creators note in the article, this kind of thing won't last forever (what Internet meme does?), but it's a lot of fun while it's around.

Hat tip: Althouse, where I've probably found out about more amusing pop-culture things (lolcats, Buffalax and the Literal Video Version series among them) than anywhere else.

A Funny Story for Wedding Season

I went to a wedding last night. That wedding went fine, but while I was there, I heard a hilarious story from a friend that had to do with the rehearsal dinner for his own wedding a while back:

This guy is a small-town dude, and his parents evidently have some sort of ranch-type spread, so the rehearsal dinner was held there. A country-and-western band was hired to play for the evening, and, as one might imagine, the beers were flowing freely throughout the night, especially among the band members.

As the night wound down, most of the rest of the band started to pack up their equipment, but the lead guitarist wanted one more beer and one more song. He performed a solo tune that was evidently rather amazing and went on for a while. Then he put his last beer down and said, "Sorry, but I gotta go too; I'm graduating from high school in the morning."

Even the groom-to-be's parents had to laugh at the ridiculousness of that one, which evidently trumped any guilt they may have had for giving that many beers to a minor.

As for the actual wedding I attended this weekend, the weather cooperated beautifully and everything went off well. Best of luck to Marc and Crystal, the happy couple; it was great to be there with you on your special day.

Kids Put the Darnedest Things in Their School Reports

I usually don't post forwarded emails, but this one is really funny:

Life Lesson# 45893 = Always check your child's homework before it gets to school!
________________________________

When asked to draw a picture of what they wanted to be when they grew up, second-grader "Sarah" turned in the lovely drawing shown below. Needless to say, the teacher was a bit surprised -- Mrs. Smith had always seemed like such a conservative woman. So she sent a note home to the girl's mother asking for clarification as to the picture's meaning.



Here's the reply the teacher received the following day:

Dear Mrs. Jones,

I wish to clarify that I am not now, nor have I ever been, an exotic dancer.

I work at Home Depot and I told my daughter how hectic it was last week before the blizzard hit. I told her we sold out every single shovel we had, and then I found one more in the back room, and that several people were fighting over who would get it. Her picture doesn't show me dancing around a pole. It's supposed to depict me selling the last snow shovel we had at Home Depot.

From now on I will remember to check her homework more thoroughly before she turns it in.

As one of my friends pointed out when I sent him the email, for something that's not a dancing pole, it is a really, really big snow shovel...

Thanks for not coming, have an ice day: We're in the midst of an ice storm warning here in the DFW area; the public schools canned all after-school activities, and the college closed well before I would have gotten there. To all my fellow Metroplexites--if you have to go anywhere tonight, be careful out there.

What's the Funniest New Thing on YouTube?a-ha! Here We Go!

Over the summer, I devoted a post to the hottest Internet meme of the time, Buffalaxing--a tip to the best-known practitioner of the genre, who took songs in foreign languages and added subtitles that didn't pretend to actually translate the words, but rather to express what the listener thought they sounded like in English. The best-known Buffalaxation is simply known as "Benny Lava," and it's still funny several months later. (And I'm not sure if I ever mentioned it on this blog, but another really funny Buffalax video is his send-up of a '70s German disco song called Moskau.)

And in the same spirit comes a new idea: the Literal Video Version of classic rock songs (limited thus far to the '80s and '90s). Creator Dustin McLean sums it up like this: "Ever wish songs just sang what was happening in the music video?" Well, now they do, and to me, the funniest Literal Version is set to one of the all-time classic videos, "Take On Me" by a-ha:



Other send-ups include "Head Over Heels" by Tears for Fears and "Under the Bridge" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Funny, funny stuff.

(Hat tip: Lileks at buzz.mn)

Funny Election Headline of the Week

Bacon defeats Fries--at least in a state senate race in Colorado.

(The comments--from Amazon's "Al Dente" food blog--are funny as well. And to prove it's not a joke, read this story, which calls it a "tasty" race.)

Say This Ten Times Fast:

(Seen on the campus of Texas A&M-Commerce, where I conducted a concert this afternoon.)

Scamming the Spam Scammers

Not much time for a regular post today, but I had to pass this on: A blogger responded to one of those Nigerian spam scam emails and strings them along for months on end. Read the whole thing; it's hilarious.

Congratulations; it's a...computer error! A patient who went to the hospital for stomach pains was eventually informed of the reason: Pregnancy. Which is pretty odd, considering that said patient is a 71-year-old grandfather. (The "good news" did indeed come to him via computer error, of the human data entry variety.)

Tha Speling Poleece R Haveing Funn Hear

I've been making fun of misspellings on business signs since pretty much the earliest days of this blog (click the "Silly Signage" tag at the bottom of this post to see more). But today, the Dallas Morning News got into the act, and they're having a lot of fun with it:

A cup of regualar coffee sounds like the perfect way to start your day.

Wouldn't some cheep gas be nice? But if you park your car, you've been warned: No in-and-out priviliges.

These mangled spellings – on real-life signs around the Dallas-Fort Worth area – underline the obvious: Spelling isn't always high on our list.

And our grammar ain't that good, too.

And I think I forgot to blog about this one a while back, but some people are becoming the Grammar Police on their own:

Last month, two men were sentenced to probation and banned from national parks for a year after getting busted for fixing errors on a sign in Grand Canyon National Park.

The men travel the country correcting signs as part of the Typo Eradication Advancement League.

And, yeah, they might have crossed the line by messing with a historical sign in a national park, but they've got a point.

Across the country and locally, our land is littered with signs, posters, ads, menus – you name it – that are riddled with spelling and grammatical errors.

In some cases, human spell-checkers battle these boo-boos by fixing the errors on their own. Others snap pictures and trash the typos on their blogs.

Yup, the latter sure applies here.

Read the whole thing, which has some really funny examples, including one that I've blogged about before: A mangled version of the word "inconvenience" (which, this time, comes out as "inconveinance"). There are also some great examples of mangled grammar in school term papers, as collected by an SMU writing instructor with the great Grammar Police name of "Diana Grumbles."

And, as I've asked on earlier posts on this subject, please feel free to submit your own examples of silly signage or garbled grammar in the comments.

Gastronomy Frog WBAGNFARB*

I've linked before to some hilarious posts involving badly-translated menu items in Chinese restaurants (meaning, in this case, restaurants actually in China). The phenomenon, often known as Engrish, is evidently widespread throughout that country, and, in light of the Olympic games going on over there, Chinese officials have been making a concerted effort to rid restaurant menus and other signage of these mangled translations.

A few months ago, CNN posted a story about the changes suggested by Chinese officials:

Local dishes like "Husband and wife's lung slice" or "Chicken without sexual life" conjure lots of furrowed eyebrows on famished foreigners.

So, with the Olympics a few short weeks away, China is giving its cuisine a linguistic makeover.

It is proposing that restaurants change the names of exotic, but bizarrely named, delicacies to make them more delectable for the estimated 50,000 visitors arriving in August for the Summer Games.

The appetizer "Husband and wife's lung slice" is taking on the more appetizing "Beef and ox tripe in chili sauce."

The government has put down more than 2,000 proposed names in a 170-page book that it has offered to Beijing hotels, according to state media.

And we finally learn the reason for the odd names; it's not always just a bad translation:

The Chinese say the names of their dishes focus more on appearance than taste or smell. But Westerners are more accustomed to names that describe the ingredients and how they are cooked -- such as pot roast.

The government realizes local names are a matter of taste, but don't want them to get lost in translation.

OK, that makes sense. So while it will be easier to decide whether or not to order "Bean curd made by a pock-marked woman" now that it's been renamed "Mapo tofu," but it won't be nearly as much fun.

But the government didn't get them all. Dave Barry is over in China at the moment (not just as a humorist, but because his sportswriter wife has official credentials), and he's found all kinds of funny stuff:

• Gastronomy frog


• Highest-ranking imperial concubine's milk bread


• Soup eel soup


• Wish beans


• Fried-centipede/Fried-starfish


• Mafia salad

Go to the August archives of Dave's blog and just keep scrolling; not only does he have pictures of the signs in question, but he also shows some of the delectable (?) local food. Scorpion on a stick, anyone?

And not everyone in China is wild about the government's effort. As one Chinese columnist quoted in the CNN story said, "it turns a menu into the equivalent of plain rice, which has the necessary nutrients but is devoid of flavor."

*As Dave Barry fans already know, WBAGNFARB stands for "would be a good name for a rock band."

Mondegreens on Steroids (My Loony Bun is Fine, Benny Lava)

We've mentioned "mondegreens" a few times before on this blog; a mondegreen is defined as the mishearing of a song lyric, replacing a word or line of text with something that sounds almost exactly like it. Common examples include "'Scuse me while I kiss the sky" from Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" being misheard as "'Scuse me while I kiss this guy," and "There's a bad moon on the rise" from Creedence Clearwater Revival's "Bad Moon Rising" behind misheard as "There's a bathroom on the right." Snopes.com also has a wonderful collection of holiday mondegreens at its site, which was where I discovered the term.

But now there's a new kind of mondegreen going around, and it involves the mishearing of foreign language songs into English, and that was the subject of a discussion at Althouse yesterday, which I missed because I was too busy blogging SNL. Evidently, I'm late to the party all over on this one, because it's been going around the Internet for a whole two months (which adds up to eons for a meme like this).

Here's what happened: A guy who calls himself Buffalax took the video to a song by a popular Indian artist, Prabhu Deva Sundaram (who's been called the" Michael Jackson of India" for his impressive dance moves), and, instead of trying to translate it from its original language of Tamil, instead made subtitles for what he thought the words sounded like in English. So is your loony bun really fine? Benny Lava wants to know:



(If you can't get the video to launch, go here to watch it.)

The actual title of the song is "Kalluri Vaanil," but pretty much everyone knows it as "Benny Lava" now, and Buffalax (who has done similar things with other songs of this type) has become synoymous with this new type of foreign-language mondegreen. I couldn't stop laughing when watching this, even after multiple viewings, and I bet it will affect you the same way.

I won't spoil the video by posting my favorite lines here; instead, I'll do so in the comments. Feel free to chime in with your own as well.

A jack (of all trades) with the box: Althouse also links to a video by a guy named Joe Raciti, who sings and accompanies himself on instruments made out of cardboard. More of his videos can be found here.

Blowing out the candles: Happy birthday to my former student David F., as well as some alumni of our college program, Josh and Juli, who were born on the same day 30 years ago.

On Church Street, It's a Dog's Life

COLCHESTER--This sign was so funny, I had to stop and take a picture of it:

Funny Defaced Sign of the Day

I got a kick out of the plaque that's next to the elevator in my hotel:

It obviously used to say that you should use the stairs unless you are told otherwise, but the way it reads now offers a little gallows humor--it implies that, if you're too old to use the stairs, you might be in quite a fix. (I'm surprised that nobody attempted to finish the now-altered sentence with "YOU'RE SCREWED" or something like that in the bottom space.)

Quote of the Day

SAN ANTONIO--It's been a busier-than-usual TMEA so far, but I had to pass along a funny quote from this morning.

As I've mentioned in previous years, our hotel is pretty much out in the boonies in terms of where the convention activities are located, but there's a reasonably reliable streetcar system that goes around town for a buck a pop (with a free return trip if you come back within two hours). It only takes dollar bills, so it seems like many people here are forever asking the front desk for change.

When i was doing that this morning, one of the college students who's here with me made a crack that went something like, "Now if you hadn't gone to that strip club, you wouldn't need more dollars." (Needless to say, such things are not amongst my forms of entertainment down here.) The desk clerk laughed, and as he counted out the dollars to me, he came up with a good crack of his own: "Don't spend it all on one girl." Heh.

More tomorrow.

Spoonerism

A funny story from last night:

While my evening combo was doing its gig, one of my colleagues took a different group of students to another location to play for a holiday reception. When they got there, the drummer realized that he had somehow gotten separated from his stick bag, so he had nothing with which to play his set. Fortunately, the place where they were playing had catering facilities, and there was a lot of cookware lying around (are you seeing where this is going?). So, sure enough, he played the entire gig using a pair of large wooden spoons for drumsticks! Otherwise, things went off without a hitch, though the drummer will probably be known as "Spooner" for the rest of his career at our college. Heh.

Incidentally, an actual spoonerism is that thing that happens when someone reverses the letters of some words in a phrase. They happened quite a bit when I was in radio, especially when a bassist named Rob Wasserman put out a new recording; he was called "Wob Rasserman" by many, many people. (My own funniest one was when I said that a guitarist was "turrently couring" with someone.)

I'm pretty wiped out from the semester, so I'll let the readers take over. Feel free to post either your favorite spoonerisms (or funny gig stories, if you're a fellow musician) in the comments.