Wednesday, July 31, 2013

My Lifelong Goal Achieved



I accomplished a lifelong goal Tuesday when I discovered the name of the song at the beginning of this video, the intro to DTV, Disney Channel's 1980s response to MTV, back when MTV played music. Disney Channel was big into responding to stuff in those days, for instance creating Mousercise as a response to Jazzercise.

Anyway, that intro song was always one of my favorites, and my adoration of the tune only increased when my beloved Phoenix Suns adopted it as their pre-tip-off jingle. Nothing gets me as pumped up as that song. Not "Eye of the Tiger," not "You're the Best Around," not "We Will Rock You."

The song was an instrumental, and had no words, so I would create my own:

Get ready

Get ready

So excited that I can't hide it, 

I'm coming into,

I'm sliding into,

The danger zone.

Didn't ever think that I'd find you 

And now that I have we are walking on air.

Didn't even think that I'd find you

And now we are walking on air

Yes the air

Way up there

In the air

Oh the air

Yes the air

Oh the air

Oh the air

Woo!

Ahem.

I needed this song. And to get the song I needed to know what it was called. The closest I could get to owning it was to dig up YouTube videos like that one and listen to snippets of it. I scanned the comments, hoping someone entranced under a similar spell would have already have done the work for me and have been willing to share the results.

No luck.

I embedded the video on Facebook, begging anyone to give it a listen and see if they could deduce the song's title.

Crickets.

Google, as powerful as it is, failed me in my decades-long search for salvation. No matter how I searched, no one seemed to know the title of the song.

And then, by some miracle, I found my answer through Shazam, a smartphone app that listens to bits of music and identifies the songs from which they came. I'm pretty sure I'd tried to Shazam the song before, but had no luck. I indulged a fleeting hope that maybe somehow, some way, Shazam had updated its database enough to include my Moby-Dick of instrumental magic.

The first time I used Shazam, it came up empty. But I would not take no for an answer. I gave it another try. And my perseverence was rewarded. The sweet result the app yielded was that the song was "RPM" by Network Music Ensemble, and was part of the "After School Rock" album.

I was afraid that Shazam was toying with me, but sure enough, a click of the sample listen button confirmed the answer to be the truth. I joyfully handed Amazon 99 cents in exchange for my childhood appreciation that had festered into a lifelong obsession.

Then I listened to the song about 20 billion times in a row. sometimes just appreciating the song, other times humming along, and occasionally belting out my made-up lyrics along with the music. I was content.

And then Caesar wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.

Tuesday, July 23, 2013

My Facebook Friending Policy

If you ask me to be Facebook friends and I add you, don't think you've accomplished anything. I am cool with accepting pretty much any person, place or thing as my "friend," because I am a shameless self-promoter who is happy to spam out links to anyone willing to be bombarded by them.

Bear in mind that although I will accept you as a friend, I will most likely not like or even read your posts. Odds are I'll hide you from my news feed because I will care little to nothing about what happens in your life. Such will be our friendship.

Although I do accept all friendships, I cheerfully destroy the relationships just as easily. Those who invite me to events and to play games usually end up not only defriended, but blocked entirely. Also, people who do things in real life to annoy me also get defriended and blocked. Because what's the good of social media if not to exact passive-aggressive revenge?

One last thing. If I can tell you are a spam porn girl, I will definitely not add you. Sorry to disappoint all of you.

Monday, July 22, 2013

Book Review: Gulliver's Travels

Gulliver's TravelsGulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


Starts off with silly whimsy but builds toward profound, relentlessly snarky truths about the human condition. This man loves him some horses. Fascinating Divine Comedy-style social criticism.



View all my reviews

Thursday, July 18, 2013

Top 5 Zombie Stories That Have Not Yet Been Told

1. The Zom Bee -- In an attempt to win the Spelling Bee, a 10-year-old boy becomes a zombie who hungers for correct spelling rather than human brains in order to achieve the single-minded dedication it takes to become a champion.

2. ZomBaby -- An undead baby wreaks adorable havoc and hijinks as he gets the zombie apocalypse off to a gurgling start and manages to hit his clueless grandpa, played by Tim Allen, in the balls every 10 minutes.

3. Downton Zombie -- A struggling but proud Victorian-era family seeks to cut costs and keep up appearances by soliciting a staff of animated corpses to serve and passive-aggressively resent them.

4. Hannah and Her Dead, Rotting Sisters -- A ripe 105 years old and still intent on playing the romantic lead in his neurotically philosophical comedies, Woody Allen discovers that the only romantic foils age-appropriate for him are those who died long ago but have come back to life.

5. OK, so I give up. There have been so many damned zombie movies, TV series, comics and books that there are only four zombie stories remaining that have yet to be told, and I have listed them all already.

Wednesday, July 17, 2013

Top 5 Covers That Would Have Sold Even More Rolling Stones Than The Terrorist One

1. Hello Kitty. Little girls, Japanophiles and ironic hipsters would have all begged their mommies to pick up copies for them at the supermarket.

2. Your Mom. Remember back when Time Magazine named everybody on the planet its co-person of the year? Just like that, only with your mom, because everybody knows about your mom. And I mean everybody.

3. Kate Upton. It's worked for the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue the last two years, so it's only a matter of time until every other magazine jumps on the trend. Scientists estimate that by 2015, all magazines will feature Kate Upton exclusively on their covers.

4. KABOOM! Just the word in bubble letters and jagged, neon bordering, 1960s Batman TV show style. That way Rolling Stone could have notified readers of its cover story, only with more class and style than a One Direction-style glamour shot of a mass killer.

5. A MAD fold-in. Because they're like two covers in one!

Saturday, July 06, 2013

J.K. Rowling Ain't Nothin' But A Copycat

Watching the 1985 movie Young Sherlock Holmes, it's obvious how much J.K. Rowling swiped to create Harry Potter and the Hogwarts universe. Watson is a bespectacled doofus who looks like Harry Potter. She swapped his role for the lanky redhead, Sherlock Holmes. And she kept the girl in the movie who looks like Hermione as Hermione.

Want more? There's a punk kid with platinum blonde hair, and there's a guy named Dudley in the British boarding school Sherlock, Watson and the Hermione girl romp around solving mysteries in.

This explains why the Young Sherlock Holmes screenwriter, Chris Columbus, took out his vengeance on Rowling by ruining her books in movie form, with those two terrible adaptations he made. It's not, after all, that Columbus lost his drive after he made it big so he ended up turning into a tepid hack of a filmmaker by the point it came time to make the Potter films. He was just pissed that Rowling stole all his ideas so he thought he'd serve revenge just the way the Klingons like it -- cold.