Creative Output

Yesterday I read an article about quasicrystals in New Scientist (which I am still several issues behind in) in which Paul Steinhardt is quoted as saying:

It turns out with wealthy people there are two subjects they’re interested in: dinosaurs and meteors. We just had to find the meteorite people.

I immediately read the phrase ‘dinosaurs and meteors’ to the tune of ‘Tylenol and Clearasil’ from The Arrogant Worms’ song ‘The Prescription Drugs Song‘, and I put down the article to start writing a parody. This kind of thing happens to me a lot; I’m halfway through writing another parody inspired by a New Scientist headline I read last week.

I had the chorus written in pretty short order, then had to look up the rest of the lyrics to remember how it went. The verses have a lot of pauses for dramatic effect where I expect there to be more unstressed syllables, and it’s all somewhat irregular due to the way the quoted speech is read. Since I didn’t have the song available to listen to at the time, I just added in the syllables in most cases, making the verses sound a bit more like the chorus. Hopefully you understand how it’s meant to be sung, because as usual, I’m probably not going to sing it. Here are the lyrics:

I ended my first quarter, as broke as broke can be.
I wondered if my customers were twice as broke as me.
So I went to a rich man with the stock I hadn’t sold
hoping that he’d pay each worthless trinket’s weight in gold.

He said, “Fellow dirt-poor fellow, the highness of my birth
means I am far above the things that still are made on Earth.”
He pondered for a minute then he said, “I’ll tell you what,
I’ll give you the Earth for these two things I haven’t got.”
He asked for:

Dinosaurs and meteors, not diamond ores or needy orph-
-ans taking police academy course to fight crime dressed as bats,
chromatophores, or Apple stores, extant apex carnivores,
or coffee laced with fungal spores that’s pooped by civet cats.

I ended my second quarter, half-starved and far in debt,
with dust from Hayabusa that I shot a star to get
and amber-cased mosquitos that had dined on dino blood
and went back to the rich man, gave his door a torpid thud.

He said, “Fellow, dirt-poor fellow, this asteroid is dust.
If you can’t provide the meteor right, the rest I cannot trust
I’ll have to grow a dinosaur before you get your pay.”
He had his lawyer shut the door and tell me, “go away!”
I gave him:

Dinosaurs and meteors, not diamond ores or needy orph-
ans taking police academy course to fight crime dressed as bats,
chromatophores, or Apple stores, extant apex carnivores,
or coffee laced with fungal spores that’s pooped by civet cats.

I came back the third quarter, too poor for skin or bone
to ask if he could pay me for the dino he had grown,
but as I sat there chewing the remainder of my shoes
I faintly heard the rich man deliver his bad news.

He said, “Fellow, dirt-poor fellow, oh, I should have known!
My dinos were wiped out by your infernal deep-space stone!
So I have failed in my travail to ‘teach a man to fish’
but worms have turned and I have learned: be careful what I wish
’cause I got:

Dinosaurs and meteors, not diamond ores or needy orph-
ans taking police academy course to fight crime dressed as bats,
chromatophores, or Apple stores, extant apex carnivores,
or coffee laced with fungal spores that’s pooped by civet cats.

Dinosaurs and meteors, not diamond ores or needy orph-
ans taking police academy course to fight crime dressed as bats,
chromatophores, or Apple stores, extant apex carnivores,
or coffee laced with fungal spores that’s pooped by civet cats.”

…and I died and that was that.

∎

Now, you might complain that Hayabusa is an asteroid, not a meteor, but since there’s no way to get a meteor, the rich man should have specified in the first place whether he wanted an asteroid, a meteoroid, or a meteorite. I’m not sure if rich people are particularly interested in chromatophores, but I like the word (and I especially like the rhythm of ‘cephalopod chromatophore‘) so I included it anyway. The other things all seem to be things certain people will pay a lot of money for.

Without planning it, I managed to mention the Arrogant Worms album titles ‘Dirt‘ and ‘Torpid‘ in this song, so I changed the original ‘shooting stone’ to ‘deep-space stone’ in order to mention ‘Space‘. The song this is parodying is on Beige.

On the subject of song parodies, I think I forgot to mention that Glen Raphael recorded a parody of Oasis’s Wonderwall about the van der Waals force, and I contributed some of the lyrics over Twitter.