A Laugh and A Cringe
Posted on 2008.09.11 at 23:13Current Mood: awake
Current Music: She Blinded Me With Science - Thomas Dolby
Two quick tales to tell today… Let’s start with the cringe.
I was listening this evening to Beatlesradio.com, which I normally access through iTunes. They play a combination of Beatle songs, solo efforts by the individual members, remixes, and covers of Beatle tunes by other artists. Tonight they played a cover I’d never heard before: “In My Life” was the song (that’s the one that starts, “There are places I remember…”). The artist was Sean Connery. It was done as a dramatic reading with piano and string quartet behind him. It was as jaw-droppingly preposterous as it sounds. It was very much in the style of the Jack Webb reading of “Try a Little Tenderness,” which I have on a Rhino Records compilation disc called Golden Throats. That disc also contains such choice cuts as William Shatner’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and Sebastian Cabot’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” I don’t know how Rhino missed this jam from Mr. Connery. It deserves to be more widely heard, as a cautionary example if nothing else.
The other tale is a joke I read today. It’s a physics joke. There are so precious few of them that I have to repeat this one:
Werner Heisenberg gets pulled over by a traffic cop. “Do you know how fast you were going?” the cop asks him.
“No,” Werner replies, “but I know where I am!”
OK, that was the joke. Trust me, the boys at MIT are snorting Mr. Pibb out of their noses over that one.
I was listening this evening to Beatlesradio.com, which I normally access through iTunes. They play a combination of Beatle songs, solo efforts by the individual members, remixes, and covers of Beatle tunes by other artists. Tonight they played a cover I’d never heard before: “In My Life” was the song (that’s the one that starts, “There are places I remember…”). The artist was Sean Connery. It was done as a dramatic reading with piano and string quartet behind him. It was as jaw-droppingly preposterous as it sounds. It was very much in the style of the Jack Webb reading of “Try a Little Tenderness,” which I have on a Rhino Records compilation disc called Golden Throats. That disc also contains such choice cuts as William Shatner’s “Mr. Tambourine Man” and Sebastian Cabot’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” I don’t know how Rhino missed this jam from Mr. Connery. It deserves to be more widely heard, as a cautionary example if nothing else.
The other tale is a joke I read today. It’s a physics joke. There are so precious few of them that I have to repeat this one:
Werner Heisenberg gets pulled over by a traffic cop. “Do you know how fast you were going?” the cop asks him.
“No,” Werner replies, “but I know where I am!”
OK, that was the joke. Trust me, the boys at MIT are snorting Mr. Pibb out of their noses over that one.
