Year: 2006

Dare to be stupid

No one writes a love song like Weird Al Yankovic.

You make me wanna hide a weasel in my shorts
You make me wanna phone home
You make me wanna write a dozen book reports
Then pack myself in styrofoam
Sometimes you make me want to build a model of the Eiffel Tower out of Belgian waffles

He writes for, and as, the shy-yet-infatuated guy that she doesn’t know exists:

How can you ignore me when you know that I can’t live without you
I have to go through your garbage just to learn more about you

Melanie, ooh
Oh sweet Me-he-he-helanie
Why won’t you go out with me

He writes lyrics that can be compared to none less than William Shakespeare:

You’re sort of everything I ever wanted
You’re not perfect, but I love you anyhow
You’re the woman that I’ve always dreamed of
Well, not really, but you’re good enough for now

And from time to time he’s just plain sweet:

Do you remember sweet Michelle
She was my high school romance
She was fun to talk to and nice to smell
So I took her to the homecoming dance

…but in that sweetness there’s an undercurrent of the sort that led to movies like Carrie…

Then I tied her to a chair and I shaved off all her hair
And I left her in the desert all alone
Well sometimes in my dreams
I can still hear the screams
Oh I wonder if she ever made it home

The ultimate Al love song, though, isn’t a love song at all. Back in high school a lipsync version won Bob Cates, Tony Gryner, Ian Coulthard, Sarah Dodge and me first prize in the North Lambton Secondary School air band competition. (Sadly, all of the photos and video of the event were destroyed in a curiously specific set of fires.) That song?

One More Minute.

Aaahh
Aaahh

Well I heard that you’re leavin’ (leavin’)
Gonna leave me far behind (so far behind)
‘Cause you found a brand new lover
You decided that I’m not your kind (aahh…)

So I pulled (I pulled) your name out (name out) of my Rolodex (oohh…)
And I tore all your pictures in two
And I burned down the malt shop where we used to go
Just because it reminds me of you (dippity dippity doo, yeah)

That’s right (that’s right) you ain’t gonna see me cryin’
I’m glad (I’m glad) that you found somebody new
‘Cause I’d rather spend eternity eating shards of broken glass
Than spend one more minute with you

I guess I might seem kinda bitter
You got me feeling down in the dumps
‘Cause I’m stranded all alone in the gas station of love
And I have to use the self-service pumps

Oh, so honey, let me help you with that suitcase
You ain’t (you ain’t) gonna break my heart in two
‘Cause I’d rather get a hundred thousand paper cuts on my face
Than spend one more minute with you

I’d rather rip out my intestines with a fork
Than watch you going out with other men
I’d rather slam my fingers in a door (yeah)
Again and again and again and again and again

Oh, can’t you see what I’m tryin’ to say, darlin’…

I’d rather have my blood sucked out by leeches (leeches)
Shove an icepick under a toenail or two
I’d rather clean all the bathrooms in Grand Central Station with my tongue
Than spend one more minute with you

Yes, I’d rather jump naked on a huge pile of thumbtacks
Or stick my nostrils together with crazy glue
I’d rather dive into a swimming pool filled with double-edged razor blades
Than spend one more minute with you

I’d rather rip my heart right out of my ribcage with my bare hands
and then throw it on the floor and stomp on it ’til I die
Than spend one more minute
With you

Aaaahhh ooooo

And with that, nothing more needs be said.

Tire fire

Rene Roy from Canada writes: What do you think about the Canadian Tire Guy being dumped?

Leah: I just heard about that. It’s kind of sad.

I’m glad Rene Roy asked this important question during last week’s Globe and Mail chat with Leah McLaren, what with boring topics like Crash-lash and intra- and extra-office romance getting all the press. 🙂 But I have to weigh in, and now’s as good a time as any: nothing against Ted Simonett or Gloria Slade, but their Canadian Tire couple ads were nothing but a ripoff of Home Hardware’s long-running earlier campaign featuring Keith Kemps and Kaya McGregor.

Kaya and Keith were superior in every way: they had realistic relationships and conversations between themselves and their neighbours, they weren’t obnoxiously condescending, and they each had (sometimes unexpected) strengths and weaknesses. (Among other things, I love the fact that she was the handy one.) I bought their characters and characterizations so much that I wrote to Stuart McLean at one point suggesting that, should his Vinyl Cafe stories ever be filmed, Keith and Kaya would be shoo-ins to play Dave and Morley.

So, with all due respect to Leah McLaren, good riddance to the CTC. May they be cursed with spending eternity with Canadian Tire’s equally- and always-obnoxious Scrooge and Santa.

Web standards

I find it somewhat ironic that both the Web Standards Project and advocate Lachlan Hunt updated their sites recently but failed to meet one of the goals of the web: that Cool URIs Don’t Change. Even if they did find that the URIs had to change, there are ways to prevent the existing ones from disappearing—but that’s exactly what happened to their feed links.

On a related topic, both sites also failed to preserve their unique item IDs in the new feeds.

Both are subtle points that affect what’s most probably a tiny minority of users… but is it setting a good example that they don’t/can’t/won’t take these implicit standards into account?

I don’t claim to be perfect in this respect—I have no idea if my feed item IDs changed when I last upgraded WordPress, for example, although I bet they did—but I’ve got a plethora of 301 Moved Permanently redirects on this site, my old one and others I manage to keep old content available. And both WaSP and Hunt kept the bulk of their URIs constant/redirected, so they’re still better than 99% of the other sites out there; the only reason I’m picking on them is that I just noticed that both feeds were dead.

More Leah

Since I posted yesterday, Google’s search algorithm has turned things around a bit: Leah McLaren‘s site for The Continuity Girl is still the third hit, but other pages have gotten a nice PageRank boost so there’s a little less bile immediately evident. I’d never even thought to look at Rotten Tomatoes for a list of Leah’s movie reviews (she’s seen a lot more than I have, but we share basically the same opinions on the ones that coincide), and this interview at Gremolata is an interesting read too. (There’s an all-salmon diet? Ewww.)

I think the funniest thing, though, is this line from her G&M bio: This is her first real job. That’s exactly how I describe the job I’ve held for a decade (ever since graduating), and I don’t plan to leave anytime soon.

Finally, for what it’s worth, Mark Evans sort of echoes my call for Leah to start a blog of her own. You know, it seems to me that a book tour would be ideal fodder for a few posts… I’m just sayin’….