Another Finger Exercise

Having penned a parody of It's a Long Way to Tipperary, it seemed only fitting to follow it with a parody of Pack up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag. Like its predecessor, it's but a finger exercise, an etude, a bagatelle:

Back up your tables and your mp3's
And save those files!
Then, even if your drive is prone to freeze,
You'll still be all smiles.

When the Cranes are Frasier-less,
They just make do with Niles;
So—
Back up your tables and your jpg's
And save those files!

Lyric © 2005 Nathaniel DesH. Petrikov

A weak ending, I know: but there it is.

As I Was Saying . . .

I've just spent two lovely weeks on Lesbos, with sidetrips to Philadelphia, Boston and Martha's Vineyard, but I've nothing to show for this gadding about but a nonce song composed somewhere between Hartford and Beantown, to the tune of the theme from Born Free:

King Kong,
The giant gorilla—
Imagine Godzilla
With two opposable thumbs.

King Kong,
The Simian Wonder—
His roar is like thunder,
Enough to drown out the drums.

Fay Wray—
Her bosoms are heaving.
Could Adam and Eve conceive
The love that they'll achieve?

Fat chance!
I'll bet my bandanna
That Adam's banana
Is no King Kong.

This afternoon—actually, yesterday afternoon—I resumed rehearsing with my DAMP (director-arranger-manager-producer), and felt for the first time in a long time that we were making progress. The juices began to flow again, and a quickie on It's a Long Way to Tipperary came to me on my way home. It was only when I sang it aloud for the first time to my daughter, that I saw that a shocking identity had worked its way into it. No fix for it has yet occurred to me:

There's a wrong way
To tip a waiter,
And a right way,
God knows;
And the right way
To tip a waiter
Is to pay him
Through the nose.
Good guys
Give him C-notes;
Cheapskates,
Just a dime.
When the bon ton
Goes to tip a waiter,
It's payday—
Big time!

Lyrics © 2005 Nathaniel DesH. Petrikov

Haste to the Wetting!

The Nyok Times reports that C. Ray Nagin, the black Democrat who has served as Mayor of New Orleans for the past three years, has begun to give serious consideration to the notion of evacuating New Orleans, given that a serious risk now exists that Hurricane Katrina might reach landfall somewhere near his city.

Mind you, he doesn't consider the risk serious enough to warrant the use of available buses for that purpose; that would be a misuse of school property. Still, I hope his foresight and prompt action send a strong message to President Bush and his creature, FEMA, that unconcern for poor Southern blacks can no longer be tolerated in this country.

(Am I Blushing?)

I'd no sooner posted my last entry at this blog, when it received a comment. And a non sequitur, at that. In short--spam.

I'm so tickled by the attention, that, in the words of Wodehouse, I'm wriggling from base to apex with boyish enthusiasm. A stockbroker interested in li'l ol' me? Most flattering! What the spammer doesn't realize, of course, is that a person whose discretionary mental energy is taken up with writing song parodies is a person who expends no mental energy in acquiring that minimal amount of capital that makes investment possible. The spammer is barking up the wrong tree.

Still, I won't turn on the word-verification feature at this site. That would spoil the fun.

Further Spurs

Granted, a ribald parody of I've Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle is precisely the sort of thing that American society so desperately needs in these dark days, but I'm not certain that I'm the man for the job. What little occurs to me is opaque and lacks cohesion. Here, in no particular order--owing to the lack of cohesion aforesaid--are an opaque chorus and an opaque verse:

I've got sperm that wiggle waggle wiggle,
Which is why I could find myself in dutch.
I've an eel that's mighty fun to sniggle,
But the elvers are strictly "Do Not Touch."

* * * *

She was with child--
She was with child.
She was fecund, so I reckoned
We could not be reconciled.

Lyric © 2005 Nathaniel DesH. Petrikov

Now, honestly: how with-it is Mr. General Public these days, when it comes to eel-related terminology? In the words of the old English toast, "'Oo's loike us? Dam' few." But rhymes for wiggle are few, so the lyricist is put in rather a cleft stick. I dread what is to come: figuring out how to use giggle without irremediably damaging my amour propre.

Rhymezone

A virtual rhyming dictionary that's quite popular--googling Rhyming Dictionary always returns it first--can be found at rhymezone. As rhyming dictionaries go, it is peculiar, to say the least. Every surname, however obscure, that once appeared in some census or other has been duly catalogued, whereas some obvious rhymes have not.

Most recently, I searched child: the result omitted reconciled and defiled, though refiled was included. According to this authority, defiled has no rhymes at all, while reconciled has but one--unreconciled. So it is with adulterated: it rhymes only with unadulterated. One senses that some programmer fed a glossary, a gazetteer, a Brooklyn telephone directory and a set of parameters gleaned from some lexicographer's definition of rhyme into a mainframe and simply let nature take its course. Indeed, given the prevalence of odd surnames in the database, it is possible that the webmaster considers that the sole purpose of a rhyming dictionary is to assist the user to compose limericks about immigrants.

The site invites feedback, but I've perceived no effect from the feedback I've given. What's wanted is a Wikipedia of Rhymes. The great merit of the Internet is its potential to aggregate in one massive work of reference the combined knowledge of all mankind, through the casual accretions of websurfers. Wikipedia has caught on to this; rhymezone hasn't.

Good Ol' Toyota

One of our most cherished of liberties in America is the God-given right to operate a motor vehicle on the public thoroughfare while inebriated. It's a right that's been under increasing attack of late, but one company has found the courage to resist the attempts of blue-noses to spoil our fun: Toyota.

Toyota, let it be noted, has for some time now been advertising motor vehicles on television to the tune of What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor?

Never let it be said that Big Business has no social conscience!

What Did I Tell You?

First verse:

If you conceive,
If you conceive,
That's the time I leave off lovin'
And levant, my love, and leave.

Lyric © 2005 Nathaniel DesH. Petrikov

I never knew until now that Jingle Jangle Jingle was an early lyric by Frank Loesser, and that he's responsible for And that song ain't so very far from wrong. Little did we know in 1942 (or whenever) that, in fifteen or twenty years, we'd look back on such nonsense as eloquent. I bring this up only to excuse the redundancy of levant . . . and leave. After leave off lovin', levant follows inevitably, so there's no help for it that I can see.

A simple frankness to the verse that the alliteration cannot entirely hide contrasts so powerfully with the absurdly clinical vaginal canal in the chorus, that I'm not sure whether an audience would realize that they're meant to laugh with me, not at me. This fear is the reason that I never attempt serious stuff.

Spurs, Take Two

Further contemplation of Lilley's I've Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle has yielded the following. It has a broader appeal in one respect, and a narrower appeal in another (and don't let me hear any puns about "broad" and "narrow," please):

I've got sperm that wiggle waggle wiggle
As they glide up the vaginal canal.
As I watch my partner's puppies jiggle,
I lament, "You'll be sorry later, pal."

Lyric © 2005 Nathaniel DesH. Petrikov

Whether I'll bother to pursue this further--oh, who am I kidding? Of course I will.

Utterly Useless Parody

In the time it took to step downstairs to post two letters and cop a fag (all right--smoke a cigarette), the following utterly useless parody of the beginning of Lilley's I've Got Spurs That Jingle Jangle Jingle popped into the old noggin. One must imagine Bob Hope singing it:

"Here's the pitch: Let Bingle wangle Kringle
To perform in his latest Christmas song—
And to cinch a record-breaking single,
Add Lamour in a tropical sarong."

Lyric © 2005 Nathaniel DesH. Petrikov, though why bother

Brushing Off an Old Idea

For all I know, it could be twenty years since a tagline occurred to me for a parody of Styne's Everything's Coming Up Roses, but I never did anything about it back then, prodigal that I was with ideas. Nowadays, though, I have to be a bit stingier about these things. This morning's commute yielded the following first draft:

La Bohème
At the Met:
Songs as catchy as catchy can get.
I, of course,
Hum the tune.
Funny—everyone's turning up noses.

Dining out—
Montrachet,
Where they serve me a piquant poulet.
I dig in—
With a spoon.
Funny—everyone's turning up noses.

I shop Prada,
Saks and Henri Bendel—
Yadda, yadda.
Still, I'm persona non grada.

At a fête
On the lawn—
There's been nothing but sunshine since dawn.
It's July,
And it's warm.
There am I,
True to form:
I strip down to my undies, 'cause it's hot.
Funny—everyone's turning up noses and knocking me—
Everyone's turning up collars and cutting me—
Everyone's turning up volumes and shunning me—
Everyone's turning up noses at me—and for what?!

Lyric © 2005 Nathaniel DesH. Petrikov