Posts Tagged parody
Joey sang some more parody lyrics I wrote, and another Hallelujah
Posted by Angela Brett in News, video on October 6, 2022
Joey Marianer (to whom, and I cannot stress this enough, I am šmarriedā£ļø) was asked to sing some computer-related songs at a company all-hands meeting, and chose The Bad Coderās Favourite Things (one of several parodies I’ve written of ‘My Favourite Things’) as one of them. It’s the third one, after Joey’s own ‘Inbox Zero’ (a new addition to our growing list of Hallelujah parodies) and Les Barker’s ‘Reinstalling Windows’ (a parody of ‘When Iām Cleaning Windows’.)
Enjoy!
In other news, we’ll be at MathsJam Annual Gathering in November, which will be a hybrid in-person (in the UK) and virtual event this year. If you like maths, or if you think you don’t like maths but want to find out why people do, or even if you just like parody songs about maths, and the time zone and/or location work for you, I highly recommend joining.
Also, surprise! I thought I’d uploaded all my JoCo Cruise 2022 footage, but I’d somehow missed the Monday concert, with Jim Boggia and Paul and Storm. You can watch it as a single video or a playlist of songs. This means I’ve uploaded more than 22 hours from that cruise, all-up.
And, double surprise (which I of course remembered a minute after publishing this post) Joseph Camann made a musical version of my performance of ‘The Duel‘ on JoCo (virtual) Cruise 2021. I love it!
Linguistic Alternative Polka (“Weird Al” Yankovic parody lyrics)
Posted by Angela Brett in News on June 16, 2022
Here are some linguistics-related parody lyrics I wrote to “Weird Al” Yankovic’s “Alternative Polka”. I’ve grouped them into numbered topics, with notes below explaining what each part is about. The topic switches don’t necessarily match the transitions between song snippets in the original.
- Soy un perdedor
‘I’m a loser’, baby,
it means that in Spanish.
Everybody!
Soy un perdedor
‘I’m a loser’, baby,
it means that in Spanish.
Hey
- I am, I am, I am
I said I wanna get copular
I said I’m gonna be copular
You said āHi, copular, Iāll be your dad.
Be your dad.”
- I know you know what’s on my mind
I know the deixis in my mind
You know the referent thatās inside
I know you know, you know, you know
- Hereās a wug, a wug, a wug, a wug
Hereās a wug, a wug, a wug
A word I never knew, this should be fun!
How do I deal when itās not the only one?
Now that there are two, itās twice as fun!
How do I deal when itās not the only one?
Donāt know what to do, thereās more than one!
Until I pluralise with linguistic morphological smarts
- Help me, my Broca part is broken
Help me, I’ve got no fluent speech
Help me, I understand but hard write speak
Help me, word brain frustrate myself
- Donāt wanna [animal noise]-talk like an animal
I want a squeal with morphemes inside
Donāt wanna [animal noise]-talk like an animal
- So hereās how this bit is fraught:
This rhyme relies on caught-cot.
Hey, hey, hey
- You slang slang slang slang slang
shame shame shame
But slang slang slang slang slang
is everything so let it go.
āCause the standards you preach
that that my speech doesnāt reach are so recent that they
ignore etymology, yo!
And every time I speak you chide;
do you know when you scold me
the old meanings did expand, also panned,
yet we understand!
And I’m here to remind you
of the complex ways language got that way
It’s not fair to deny me
of the force of change that still acts today.
You oughta know
Hey
Despite all your rage, language still has to constantly change.
Despite all your rage, language still has to constantly change.
And someone will say something āwrongā thatās right the next day.
Despite all your rage, language still has to constantly change!
- I hate all the ‘uās
from lands of old.
I hate -our language too
when you write o-u-r.
I don’t o-u anything!
I don’t o-u anything!
I don’t o-u anything!
I don’t o-u anything!
- Language sounds, all around,
watch how they compound!
Language sounds, all around,
they abound.
Language sounds, language sounds
they confound
language sounds, language sounds
so unsound!
language sounds, language sounds
Do you have the time to listen to my rhyme?
Sounds similar and different all at once.
That is one of those minimal pairs that show
phonetic contrast also is phonemic.
A dozen ways to say a /t/
Sometimes my ears play tricks on me
Iām stuck on this grey tape; I think Iām a great ape
Are these distinct phonemes, or allophones?
Are they allophones?
Hey!
Here’s my explanation of the different parts. Please note that while I do have a Masters in Linguistics, I am in no way an expert on any of these things (though I’m pretty sure about the Spanish), so don’t take my word for it.
- Pretty self-explanatory, really. ‘Soy un perdedor’ is Spanish for ‘I’m a loser’. All I changed from the original was the punctuation and the explanation, ‘It means that in Spanish.’
- Copulas and copular verbs link the subject of a sentence to a complement, which can be all sorts of things, including both nouns and adjectives. So the copula ‘am’ in “I am hungry” is followed by an adjective, but it could just as well be followed by a noun. This gives rise to the popular ‘dad joke’ format:
Kid: I’m hungry.
Dad: Hi, Hungry; I’m Dad.
I feel like the copular sense of the verbs ‘feel’ and ‘look’ also have a role in this format of dad joke, though I’m not sure how to properly describe it linguistically:
Kid: I feel like an ice cream.
Dad: Well, you don’t look like one!
(You, as a dad: Well, you don’t look like the copular sense of the verbs ‘feel’ and ‘look’ also have a role in this format of dad joke, though I’m not sure how to properly describe it linguistically!)
But I suppose that’s really just two distinct meanings of the phrasal verb ‘feel like‘, and an implicit ‘eating’ in the Kid’s sentence, which the Dad ignores. Still, you can see how ‘look’ is copular in sentences such as ‘I look weird’. For most verbs, e.g. ‘sing’, you’d have to say ‘I sing weirdly‘, but with ‘look’ it’s just a more specific way of saying ‘I am weird’. We can veer back into dad joke territory when we use a word such as ‘well’ that can be either an adverb or an adjective:
Kid: You look well!
Dad: That’s because I have good eyesight.
Here, the Kid is using ‘look’ as a copula, and ‘well’ as an adjective meaning ‘healthy’, so the phrase means that the Dad appears to be healthy, but the Dad is interpreting ‘look’ as a regular verb and ‘well’ as an adverb, such that the phrase means he’s good at looking at things.
This is more than I expected to say to complement this subject. See also the explanation of #9 for an example of the zero copula as used in African American Vernacular English. - Deixis is when the same word can mean different things depending on context, such as who’s saying the word, when and where they’re saying it, where they’re pointing, and so on. Joey and I made a video demonstrating personal deixis. This lyric just expresses that we only tend to use deixis when we’re pretty sure whoever we are communicating with knows what the deictic words are referring to.
- This refers to the Wug Test ā a test of how well a young child understands the rules of their language. The titular example is when a child is shown a picture of a cute little creature and told it is called a ‘wug’. The child is then shown two of them, and asked what they are called. If they understand how words are usually pluralised in English, they’ll answer ‘wugs’. Wugs are very popular with linguists. They are the reason that if I ever record a sequel to my album Wake Up Gasping, it will have to have the same acronym.
- Broca’s Area is a part of the brain involved in language production. A person whose Broca’s area is damaged may have Broca’s aphasia, where they can generally understand writing and speech or signing but have difficulty producing language themselves, usually missing out grammatical function words. I’ve tried to mimic this kind of language in the last two lines (to the extent that the song allows). I hope that this is a somewhat realistic example and not seen as making fun of people with any form of aphasia. I watched some videos by Sarah Scott and Mike Caputo to get an idea of how people with Broca’s aphasia speak and how hard they work to improve their communication.
- Morphemes are the smallest units of language that carry some kind of meaning. For instance, ‘mean’ and ‘ing’ are separate morphemes. A single morpheme can be made up of multiple sounds, but those sounds don’t mean anything by themselves. This is called ‘double articulation‘, and it’s one of the properties of human language that doesn’t tend to exist in animal communication. In fact, perhaps it would point out that difference better to say ‘I want a squeal with phonemes inside’. But we have phonemes in part #10.
- This is what started me writing this ridiculous thing, back in October 2020. The original lyrics are:
My whole existence is flawed.
You get me closer to God.
which got me thinking about how that very couplet is flawed ā it doesn’t rhyme in my accent. It relies on the cot-caught merger, where the vowels in the words ‘cot’ and ‘caught’ are pronounced the same. ‘Flawed’ has the same vowel as ‘caught’, and ‘God’ has the same vowel as ‘cot’. In accents with the cot-caught merger, those are both the same vowel, so ‘flawed’ rhymes with ‘God’ and ‘fraught’ rhymes with ‘cot’, but in accents without the merger, those are two different vowels, so the rhyme doesn’t work. You can explore other rhymes that depend on the cot-caught merger and other accent-specific features in Rhyme.Science, the rhyming dictionary I made. - Some nice people like to ‘correct’ others for using words differently from how they do. Sometimes they take exception to usages they consider ‘new’, but don’t realise have been around for hundreds of years. Sometimes they happily use words and grammar that were considered incorrect much more recently. Sometimes they call things ungrammatical because they’re using the grammar of a different dialect. Sometimes they try to use the etymology of a word to dictate how it should be used today. In all of these cases, if they knew more etymology, they’d understand that everything we say comes to us via previously-pooh-poohed mistakes, mispronunciations, dialectal or regional variations, calques, borrowings, slang, analogies, generalisations, specialisations, misunderstandings, rebracketings, back-formations, metaphors, and so on. There’s not much point trying to stop these processes, though I’m sure somebody tried to stop the language you consider correct today from getting how it is.
To learn more, I can recommend The History of English Podcast, etymonline, Grammar Girl, Lingthusiasm, The Unfolding of Language, andā¦ wait, I should probably stop here before I list the entire contents of my podcast library and the bookcase to my right. Justā¦ take your impulse to quash somebody else’s communication and redirect it towards learning more yourself. - Where my Noah Webster stans at? Here’s an entire song parody I wrote about -or vs. -our spellings.
- Spoken languages have a lot of sounds in them! More sounds than the speakers realise. To figure out what the basic units of sound in a given language (called phonemes, and written between /slashes/) are, you need to find ‘minimal pairs’ ā words that only differ by one sound. You can tell that /t/ and /r/ are different phonemes in English, because ‘time’ and ‘rhyme’ are different words. But there are actually many different ways of saying /t/, depending on context, and even though they are distinct sounds (called phones, and written in [square brackets]) they are all perceived as the same /t/ phoneme. This is the case for /r/ and other phonemes as well. The different sounds that are all perceived as the same phoneme in a given language are called allophones of that phoneme.
Note that sounds that are allophones in one language can be separate phonemes in another ā for instance, in Spanish, a single phoneme has allophones that English speakers would hear as the separate phonemes /b/ and /v/.
Sometimes we actually can use allophones to distinguish between phrases, though! For instance, we can hear the difference between ‘gray tape’ and ‘great ape’. The difference is called a juncture, and I’ll be honest, I read about it last week on wikipedia and have not read the citation, so I’m really not sure whether this makes them distinct phonemes or still allophones. By the way, humans are in the Hominidae family commonly called the ‘great apes’ (though some uses of that term exclude humans), so if you think that you’re a great ape, you probably are.
This part of the song has another kind of sound ā sounding weird! The original song has ‘melodramatic fools’ where I put ‘minimal pairs that show’, and both lyrics have a stress on the second syllable, where it wouldn’t normally go. In this case, all that does is make it sound a bit wrong, but syllable stress can also be phonemic and can differentiate words. For instance, the minimal pair ‘abstract’ (the adjective or noun, with the stress on the first syllable) and ‘abstract’ (the verb, with the stress on the second syllable.) There are many English words which change stress depending on which part of speech they are (convict, record, laminate, attribute, etcā¦), but in a lot of cases the unstressed vowel also changes to a schwa, so the stress isn’t the only difference.
That’s all I have to say about that! Next, perhaps I’ll finish the entirely unnecessary parody lyrics about PSOLA that I started writing in 2016, so if you’re playing these on a string instrument, stay tuned!
A successful ploy to increase engagement
Posted by Angela Brett in News on January 2, 2022
Well, in 2021, among other things, I released an iOS app and a poetry album, wrote an article about accessibility, tech edited three articles about iOS development, won my second Fancy Pants Parade, did a poetry show, wrote a macOS app to find words that look or sound like they’re related but aren’t and a script to make etymological family trees, found a job, lost a job, found a job again, and finally buried a job in soft peat for three months and recycled it as firelighters (that last bit is an exaggeration. Burning jobs to keep warm is not advisable.)
Here’s another exciting thing that happened that I didn’t mention on this blog. During a brief lull in the apocalypse, Joey Marianer came to visit, and we got engagedā¦ to each other! We had of course already discussed this previously, and I wasn’t expecting a song and dance to be made about it, but there was nevertheless a song, as follows:
It’s a parody of the “Weird Al” Yankovic original, “Good Enough for Now“. I find metal rings uncomfortable and a bit dangerous, so Joey got me a silicone engagement ring with a ring on it. This is a much cooler idea than the off-the-shelf ring I got Joey which has flowers on it and no explicit mathematical concepts.
The pretense for recording that was that immediately beforehand, we’d sung some words I’d written to a tune that came to Joey in a dream:
Joey happened to be here while my friend Phil got married (a year later than planned) and joined a group of Phil’s vaccinated and tested friends to celebrate in Tenerife. So here we are walking along the beach looking all couple-y.
I’ll eventually put up videos of some things we saw in Tenerife. After we got back from Tenerife but before Joey went home, we recorded a few short videos in which we are exceedingly cute at each other while demonstrating some linguistic concepts. Here we explore the differences in our accents:
And here we demonstrate how personal deixis can change the meaning of a sentence depending on context:
So, plague willing, we’ll get married in February, have multiple wedding-adjacent cake-eating parties in various real and virtual places over the next several years, and at some point during that time I’ll get the appropriate visa so we can move in together and hopefully only get on each other’s c-tactile nerves.
And now for some unrelated things to look forward to on my YouTube channel. The above videos were shot on my iPhone, which was my first experience with 4K HDR. I’m not sure if editing that on my mid-2014 MacBook Pro did the HDR justice.
However, I bought a new camera recently which can do 4K, and also has several other features which will make recording concerts (and indeed, entire cruises full of concerts) easier ā no more stopping to get around a 4GB file size limit, or change batteries, or change SD cards. I won’t generally film entire concerts in 4K due to the space requirements and likelihood of the camera overheating and shutting down, but it’s a nice feature to have for other things. I’ve also ordered the new MacBook Pro, which will have a better display for viewing and editing such video.
I planned to film as much as possible of a concert here in Vienna in 4K, just to see how long I could film continuously in 4K if I took all the measures I knew about to prevent overheating. The concert had to be cancelled due to lockdown, so instead, I recorded myself talking about how I got to work at CERN, as a sequel to the video about getting a laptop from Woz and going to a concert with him. I recorded in 4K for 36 minutes nonstop (which is longer than my old camera can record nonstop even in 1080p) before I ran out of things to say, so I’d call that a successful test. When the new MacBook arrives, I’ll edit that video and hopefully put it online before flying away to get married and (insert SARS-CaVeat here) record an entire cruise full of concerts. I hope I remember how to record and process an entire cruise full of concerts after a year off, and don’t make too many mistakes with the new camera.
Things I forgot to blog about, part n+1: NanoRhymo #2
Posted by Angela Brett in NanoRhymo on January 21, 2020
In November 2018 I created NanoRhymoĀ (inspired by NaNoWriMo), in which I wrote and tweeted a very short rhyming poem every day. I did the same thing in April 2019 for Global Poetry Writing Month. I started pretty late with NanoRhymo in 2019, and didn’t end up with a poem for each day of November, but I’ve started it again on January 1 and made up for the missing poems. In November, I mostly stuck to writing something based on a random rhyme from the rhyming dictionary I made, rhyme.scienceĀ ā either a new one I’d found each day, or one generated earlier for the @RhymeScience twitter feed. In January, I’ve often been inspired by other things.
I’ll continue writing a NanoRhymo a day for as long as I can. Here’s what I’ve written so far:
Day 1, Ā inspired by the rhymes later, translator, and (in non-rhotic accents) convey to:
When youāve got a thought to convey to
many mortals, sooner or later,
then you ought to get a translator.
Day 2, inspired by the rhymeĀ chunked and bunked, and the folk etymology of ‘chunder’:
Sailors lying in their bunks
would shout āAhoy there, mateā¦ watch under!ā
and then let loose digested chunks
on hapless seamen sleeping under.
Thatās why even now, down under,
[I am lying; truth debunks!]
some refer to puke as chunder.
[This is half-digested junk
Please accept my weak apology
and not this doubtful etymology.]
Day 3, inspired by a friend’s experience learning flying trapeze:
My friend Robert Burke tried the flying trapeze.
It meant lots of work mulling hypotheses,
and then much amusement and catching catchees,
to end up all bruised on the backs of the knees.
Day 4, inspired by the rhymeĀ spermicides and germicide’s:
Looking at small things up close and myopically,
one might prevent overgrowth with a germicide.
But looking at large things afar, macroscopically,
one must prevent unchecked growth with a spermicide.
Day 5, inspired by the rhymeĀ explainable and containable:
As soon as the bug is explainable,
we can hope that it might be containable,
and our neural nets will be retrainable,
and our code is so very maintainable
that this progress is surely sustainable!
Day 6, inspired by the rhyme freaking and unspeaking:
Mouth agape, stunned, unspeaking
Eyes wide open, silent freaking,
What could this strange vision be?
a music video, on MTV?!
Day 7, inspired by the rhyme trekked and collect:
Over much terrain they trekked;
specimens they did collect,
to show just how diverse life was
before we killed it off, just ācause.
Day 8, inspired by the rhyme interleaved and peeved:
If rhyming couplets leave you peeved,
here, I tried ABAB.
Now the rhymes are interleaved!
This rhyme and rhythmās reason-free.
Day 9, a rewrite of Day 8 that can be sung to a possibly recognisable tune:
If rhyming couplets leave you peeved,
Then try to make them interleaved
Or donāt, and then just let the hate flow through ya
Just AAB, then CCB
This rhyme and rhythmās reason-free.
At least it can be sung to Hallelujah.
The most Hallelujest Joey Marianer sang that version:
Day 10, inspired by the rhyme platitudes and latitude’s, and my general dislike of casual hemispherism:
Iām just fine with the end-of-year platitudes ā
āHappy Holidaysā, nice and generic,
but please, be inclusive of latitudes:
āHappy Winterā is too hemispheric!
Day 11, another Hallelujah, inspired by Joey’s singing of the previous Hallelujah:
A kitchen scale, a petrol gauge,
a cylinder, a final page
will tell you up to what things have amounted.
An abacus, a quipu string,
some tally sticks, to always sing,
are all things on which Joey can be counted.
Day 12, inspired by the rhyme deprecations and lamentations, some deprecated code I was removing from the software I develop at work, and also complaints about macOS Catalina dropping support for 32-bit applications. I imagine it sung to the tune of Camp Bachelor Alma Mater:
Hear the codersā lamentations
over apps that will not run,
due to years-old deprecations,
updates that theyāve never done.
Day 13, inspired by the rhyme whoop’s and sloop’s, and the tradition on JoCo Cruise of ending the final concert with the song Sloop John B:
Have some more whoops on me,
hearing the Sloop John B
as JoCo Cruise comes to an end.
You still have all night.
Hang loose, or sleep tight.
Well, we feel so broke up
but youāll stay my friend.
Day 14, to the tune of Morning Has Broken:
Something is broken;
look at that warning!
Unbalanced token.
Unknown keyword.
Raise the exceptions.
Erase all the warnings.
Raze preconceptions wrongly inferred.
Day 15, inspired by Hilbert’s paradox of the Grand Hotel:
The rooms are all full for as far out as they can see;
such a big guest house to fill, but oh well.
Whatās this? Nonetheless, thereās a sign saying vacancy!
Thereās always more room at the Hilbert hotel.
Day 16, inspired by the rhyme feeling’s and ceilings, and the song Happy, by Pharrell Williams:
Clap along if you feel like a room without a roof.Ā š
Please applaud if you think youāre a chamber with no ceiling. š
Clap along If you feel like happiness is the truth.Ā š
Please applaud if you think thereās veracity in good feelings.Ā š
For day 17, I letĀ Pico, emacs, ed, viĀ count as the NanoRhymo, even though it does not mention the text editor nano.
November ended with no more rhymes, but I started it up again on January 1, simply because I was inspired to, and I continued to get ideas every day since. I’m not promising to keep this up daily all year (indeed, I promise not to keep it up during MarsCon and JoCo Cruise 2020) but I’ll post NanoRhymi whenever I feel inspired to.
Day 18 (on January 1, 2020) was inspired by the rhyme unworthy and incur the:
Donāt worry that you might incur the
sentence, āThat personās unworthy.ā
Just try what you wish, and try plenty,
and have a great year twenty-twenty.
Day 19, inspired by the rhyme verb and kerb, but using the North American ācurbā spelling because itās closer to the verb derived from the noun:
If youād punch down, or kick to the curb
for verbing a noun, or nouning a verb,
researching the past will amount your disturb.
So many of the words we used today, including some in that poem, were once strictly parts of speech other than the ones they’re used as without a second thought today, and people objected to their shifts in usage just as they object to all manner of language change today.
Day 20, inspired by the rhymes occur to, Berta, and (in non-rhotic accents)Ā subverter:
If it were to occur to Berta the subverter to hurt Alberta,
sheād prefer to assert a slur to refer to her to stir internal murder.
(Stones break bones but names make shame ā heals more slowly, hurts the same.)
Day 21, inspired by the rhyme unconcealed and unpeeled:
While youāre growing in the field,
all your goodness is concealed,
till some lovely creature picks you,
doesnāt think they have to fix you,
lets you chill, let down your shield;
then, when you are fully peeled,
your sweetest inner self revealed,
that cunning rascal bites and licks you.
Day 22, inspired by the rhymes for fish, dwarfish, and (maybe in some non-rhotic accents with the cot-caught merger) standoffish, the ‘teach a man to fish‘ metaphor, and of course, my own poem, They Might Not Be Giants:
If a personās always asking for fish,
donāt give them one, and go away, standoffish.
Teach techniques that theyāll expand on.
Be the shoulders they will stand on.
Not a giant ā generous and dwarfish.
And then the same thing as a limerick:
There once was a man asking for fish,
who got one from someone standoffish.
Then shoulders to stand on
and tricks to expand on,
were given by someone quite dwarfish.
Day 23, inspired byā¦ certain kinds of transphobic people, I guess:
Some folk seem to be offended
by the thought the queerly gendered
might themselves become offended
when theyāre purposely misgendered,
so theyāve boorishly defended
all the hurt that they intended
towards the āeasily offendedā
who are āwimpsā to try to end it.
Day 24, a double dactyl inspired by a conversation with someone who’s considering hormone therapy with one aim being a reduction of schlength, during which we noticed that ‘endocrinologist’ is a double dactyl, and also inspired by Paul and Storm’s habit of calling Jonathan Coulton ‘Dr. Smallpenis‘ (with the ‘e’ unstressed) which began on JoCo Cruise 2013:
Dr. Jon SmallpÉnis,
Endocrinologist,
helps you to shrink all the
parts that arenāt you.
Piss off, dysphoria!
Spironolactone could
soon make you tinkle the
whole darn day through.
Spironolactone is a medication that blocks the effect of testosterone, which as a side effect can increase urinary frequency.
Day 25, inspired by the rhyme eleven words and heavenwards:
Dear Father, a prayer I remember, amen.
Another, sincere from a vendor, again.
As if by reciting just ten or eleven words
Iāll lift myself quite transcendentally heavenwards.
Day 26, inspired by what I was actually told at my first comprehensive annual checkup:
Sit up straight!
Lose some weight!
Take these pills!
Cure your ills!
Your heart is beating!
Youāre good at breathing!
With those two habits kept up,
Weāll see you at the next yearās checkup.
They really did seem impressed by how well I could breathe. I wasn’t too good at it when I started, but I have been practising my whole life, and if I’m good then I may as well continue the habit.
Day 27, inspired by this Smarter Every Day video about activating smart speakers using laser light instead of sound:
Hereās a technique that is quite underhand
to beam gadgets speaking they might understand,
and give an unsound and light-fingered command.
This oneĀ works best in accents without the trap-bath split, so that ācommandā rhymes with āunderstandā and āunderhandā.
Day 28, inspired by a container of those little dowel things to hold up shelves, which was labelled ‘Safety trans.’, and the song The Safety Dance, by Men Without Hats. This parody is presumedly to be sung by Women and Nonbinary People Without Hats:
You can trans[ition] iff you want to.
You can leave your assigned gender behind.
āCause your assigned gender aināt trans and if you donāt trans[ition],
Well your assigned gender stays assigned.
Day 29, inspired by a video about Jason Padgett, who survived a vicious beating to end up with (among less attractive brain issues) savant skills and a kind of synaesthesia:
Acquired savants suffer pain,
to wake up with a better brain.
Get a bump, or have a seizure,
then end up with synaesthesia ā
not the grapheme-colour kind,
rather, an amazing mind!
Day 30Ā is a version of day 29’s poem which can be sung to the tune of Hallelujah, with a second verse reminding people that synaesthesia is actually pretty common, affecting about 4.4% of people, (I have the grapheme-colour kind) and doesn’t necessarily confer superpowers:
Acquired savants suffer pain,
to wake up with a better brain
by healing from an injury or seizure.
They sometimes get amazing minds
associating different kinds
of input in a thing called synaesthesia.
Synaesthesia, synaesthesia, synaesthesia, synaesthesia.
But synaesthetes are everywhere,
not magical, or even rare.
It doesnāt make them smart or make things easier.
It just makes Thursday forest green,
or K maroon and 7 mean.
Your ātheā-tastes-like-vanilla synaesthesia
Synaesthesia, synaesthesia, synaesthesiaā¦
This refers to time-unit-color synaesthesia, grapheme-colour synaesthesia, ordinal linguistic personification (also known as sequence-personality synaesthesia), and lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, but there are many other kinds.
Day 31, a parody of ABBA’s Fernando for which I am deeply sorry:
Did you hear he goes commando?
I remember long ago another starry night like this.
In the firelight, commando,
he was wearing his new kilt and playing bagpipes by the fire.
I could hear his sudden screams
and sounds of mountain oysters sizzling in the fryer.
Day 32, inspired by two tweets I saw, each quoting the same tweet where someone had contrasted pictures of Prince Harry in the army with pictures of him with his wife, and claimed that getting out of the army and getting married was somehow emasculation caused by ‘toxic’ Hollywood feminism:
The two tweets happened to rhyme with each other and follow the same structure, from the ‘fellas, is it gay’ meme, so I put them together, and added a few lines:
Fellas, is is gay to have a wife?
Fellas, is it gay to be a human being with a life?
Fellas, is it gay to wear a suit?
Fellas, is it gay to dress to socialise instead of shoot?
(Fellas, is it toxic to be gay?
Fellas, why frame questions with a word she didnāt say?)
Day 33, another Hallelujah parody, inspired by Joey’s observation that NanoRhymo scans:
You want to practise writing verse.
The secretās to be very terse.
You donāt have to try hard, just have to try moā.
You write some doggārel every day
and some youāll toss, but some will stay.
An atom at a time; itās NanoRhymo.
NanoRhymo, NanoRhymo, NanoRhymo, NanoRhymo.
Day 34, inspired by a Twitter thread which began with my friend Rob Rix expressing frustration with type inference, and one of his followers suggesting the term ‘type deference’:
I love when it complies,
regards me with deference,
and bravely compiles
my unguarded dereference.
Day 35, inspired byā¦ tea. I feel so rich when I make a pot of tea and top it up all day, having unlimited tea without feeling like maybe it’s wasteful to be using my eighth teabag of the day:
If hot teaās an oddity,
the tea bagās your commodity,
but if you drink a lot of tea,
you should make a pot of tea.
(To add some boiling water tā
whenever you want hotter tea.)
Day 36, inspired by my efforts to write an AppleScript to copy all my NanoRhymi and GloPoWriMo poems from Notes into a spreadsheet in Numbers, which initially failed because I had accidentally addressed the script to Pages instead, and Pages don’t know sheet:
š©š»āš»Hello there! Your finest Greek corpus, to go!
š©āš³The what now? Not understand corpus, no no!
š©š»āš»The active Greek corpus, the frontmost, the first, display all the corpora you have; am I cursed?
š©āš³Iām sorry? Your question is Greek to meā¦ how?
š©š»āš»Okay then, just show me your bookcases, now!
š©āš³Bookcases? I have none; youāve made a mistake.
š©š»āš»Ah, frack! Youāre no linguist! Youāre actually the baker!
The spreadsheet, by the way, shows I’ve written about a hundred of these small poems in total so far, in the course of my NanoRhymo and GloPoWriMo stints. I haven’t gone through it checking for notes that didn’t contain completed poems, so I don’t know the exact number yet. In the next roundup of these things, I’ll probably start numbering them based on that total, rather than the ‘days’ of any particular run of them.
Day 37 (today, as I write this), a parody of Taylor Swift’s ‘Shake it Off‘ inspired by another tweet by Rob Rix, in which he notices that a calculation done in Spotlight Search which should give the result zero does not, and remarks, ‘computers gonna compute’:
āCause the bugs are are gonna ship, ship, ship, ship, ship
And an on bit is a blip, blip, blip, blip, blip
Iām just gonna flip, flip, flip, flip, flip
I flip it off ā½, I flip it off šš»
That’s all of the NanoRhymi I have so far; I’ll post more here occasionally, but follow me on Twitter if you want to see them as they happen.
ā
In other news, please consider buying one or all of the MarsCon Dementia Track Fundraiser albums, which are albums of live comedy music performances from previous MarsCon Dementia Tracks, sold to raise funds for the performers’ hotel costs for the next one. The 2020 fundraiser album (with the concerts from MarsCon 2019) is nearly four hours of live comedy music for $20, and includes my performances of Chicken Monkey Duck and Why I Perform at Open Mics.
For yet more music, Joey and I will be participating in round #16 of SpinTunes, a songwriting competition following in the footsteps of Masters of Song Fu. I’ve been following it since the beginning, but never had the accompaniment to actually enter.
Pico, emacs, ed, vi (Pico and Sepulveda parody lyrics)
Posted by Angela Brett in NanoRhymo on November 29, 2019
The following are parody lyrics to the song Pico and Sepulveda, about text editors. I imagine that if someone sang them, I’d want to make a music video consisting of the lyrics shown in each text editor in time with the song.
pico, emacs, ed, vi,
pico, emacs, ed, viā¦
SublimeText
mcedit
or Notepadā¦
++
xedit,
TextEdit
or Notepadā¦
++
You can use BBEdit
or an IDE,
EVE or Atom or ex.
TeachText never vexed
but for NeXT I want to feel
perplexed and try escaping out of
pico, emacs, ed, viā¦
to NotePadā¦
++
The editor you can quit!
ā
This idea popped into my head when I saw yet another thread of people discussing their favourite text editors. Writing these lyrics did nothing to get them out of my head, so let’s see if putting them here works.
Pico is the editor I typically use if I must use a command-line editor, because it’s fairly easy to use even when I haven’t used it for a while and don’t remember any secrets, and most importantly, it’s easy to exit. I usually use GUI text editors though. If I’ve left out your favourite editor, just paste these lyrics into said editor and edit them.
In other news, I’m making a halfhearted effort at NanoRhymo over on Twitterā¦ ostensibly a short, rhyming poem for each day of November, but I started late and have only done 16 so far, plus this one, all in a thread:
Also, my poem They Might Not Be Giants is in issue 10 of Chalkdust magazine, just in time for me to go to the MathsJam Annual Gathering this weekend. I’ll bring a few larger-than-usual posters of it in case anyone wants them.
With or Without U (U2 Parody)
Posted by Angela Brett in Holiday Highlights, The Afterlife on December 23, 2018
Here are some parody lyrics to U2’s With or Without YouĀ which I wrote in response to a facebook comment back in May. It’s about time I shared them:
The contours of paramours
The velour of troubadours
Theyāre spelled with u
But in colour, labour day
with far-harbour ardour, neighbours say
They will write, without u
Write -or without u
Write -or without u
Not behaviour to condemn
Who has honour, humour them
Latinate roots for u
Spelled -or without u
Spelt -or without o-u-r
These are spelled
With or without u
And your dialectās okay
And your spelling is okay
And you spell
And you spell
And your spelling is okay
My armourās breached
There is no errour in yor ways
just flavour and splendour
And can I lend a vowel?
And your dialectās okay
And your spelling is okay
And you spell
And you spell
And your spelling is okay
With or without u
With or without o-u-r
These are spelled
With or without u
Oā¦ O-U, O-R
With or without u
With or without o-u-r
These are spelt
With or without u
With or without u
ā
Enjoy it with or without U2’s version playing along. I’d like to say that I used my Masters degree in linguistics to write this, but really, everything came from the -or, -our section of the Wikipedia page on American and British English spelling differences. I threw in a few other spelling variations for fun.
I hope you’re enjoying the holiday season. For those who celebrate Christmas, vicariously or otherwise, here’s a playlist of Christmas-related things I’ve uploaded to YouTube, and the tag of Christmas-related blog posts I’ve written.
I Love Your Body is a song again, and other news
Posted by Angela Brett in News, Things To Listen To on May 6, 2018
Remember how I wrote a poem called I Love Your Body, and Joey Marianer sang it, and then I wrote another version/parody of the same poem? Well, Joey also sang that version:
In other news, I’ve recorded myself performing at open mics a few times lately, but I’m mostly focusing on uploading JoCo Cruise footage first. I did, however, upload this video of myself performing Mike Phirman‘s song Chicken Monkey Duck:
It’s always a crowd pleaser, and this video also pleased Mike Phirman himself, so that’s great. He deserves to be pleased!
I’m wearing an official Back to the Future hat that I bought from Universal Studios in the year 2015 (the future!) and some leggings made with Chicken Monkey Duck fabric designed by Jade Gordon specifically to go with the song.
On the subject of merchandise, I’ve made my They Might Not Be Giants poster available on Teechip, as that seems to give a better price and shipping than the other platforms it’s on. Ignore the ‘Last day to order’ warning; the campaign restarts automatically. But hey, do order soon if you want to get the poster soon. That’s how causality works, you see.
I’ve also finally started a Bandcamp page ā everybody else is doing it, so why can’t I? Right now it just has my ‘Why I Perform at Open Mics‘ rap, but I intend to add many of the other recordings that have been either on The FuMP Sideshow or my long-neglected podcast, just as soon as I gather together lossless versions of everything. The podcast was a pain to update, and I think Bandcamp will be a much easier way for people to find and download all of my recordings.
I’ll also add the recording of They Might Not Be Giants I did for the poster video, and any further recordings of poems, raps, or robot choir or even human-choir songs that I happen to make. Some might feature my musical friends. Most, if not all, will be pay-what-you-like. Ā If you want to know as soon as I add anything, click the ‘Follow’ button on my shiny new bandcamp. Do you have a favourite poem of mine that you’d like a recording of? Let me know, and maybe I’ll make one.
I Love Your Body (a new version!)
Posted by Angela Brett in NaPoWriMo on April 3, 2018
A while ago I wrote a poem called I Love Your Body, about some reasons to love a person’s body that aren’t superficial. Then Joey sang it, because his body can do that. Here’s what could be considered either a parody or a continuation of that poem, illustrating what can happen if you do treat someone’s body like a piece of meat:
I love your body
The way it feels like silk
The way it looks good naked
The way it smells like your perfume
The way it tastes so good in a casserole
I donāt love its flaws
The way its flesh resists my knife
The way its bones donāt decompose
The way it wonāt fit in my freezer
The way its leftovers putrefied, and made my neighbour suspicious, and she tipped off the police, and there was a highly publicised trial, and now Iām in prison for life
But I love
that you had it
so that I could have you,
because brains need energy
and thereās no KFC
with home delivery.
I love your body
I hope to hold it forever
and think of you
with a love-filled belly.
ā
Soā¦ yeah. That’s a thing I wrote. It may be related to repeated exposure to Tom Lehrer’s ‘I Hold Your Hand in Mine’ recently. It’s based in fact, though; my freezer is very small.
In other news, Alfred Ladylike, who produced my rap about open mics, now has a Patreon. Perhaps you’d like to throw a dollar or ten at it.
Negative Return (a poem about a Space Shuttle launch and/or a breakup)
Posted by Angela Brett in NaPoWriMo on April 2, 2018
Well, it’s Global Poetry Writing Month again. I can’t promise to blog a poem every day, but I have a few I prepared earlier. Here’s one called Negative Return, which I wrote in 2015 in order to have an excuse to wear my flight suit on stage. It’s about a Space Shuttle launch, or a breakup, or a breakup in which the person breaking up with you is leaving in a Space Shuttle (my preferred way of breaking up with someone.) It was inspired by something a tour guide at Kennedy Space Center said, which I happened to record audio of.
This particular performance is from the open mic on the 2018 JoCo Cruise, even though on the JoCo Cruise, no excuse is needed to wear a flight suit at any time.
I’ve performed it a few times in Vienna, with slightly different wording, though I’d never actually posted about it here before. Here’s a playlist of the recorded versions of it.
Immediately before me at the open mic, Joey Marianer, who follows me around singing everything I say, sang my parody of Jonathan Coulton’s ‘Glasses’:
As I’ve previously mentioned, he’d sung it before on YouTube, but I think this live performance was even better.
I’m still processing, uploading, and getting the performers’ permission to post my video from the rest of the open mic.
I recommend watching the video if you can rather than just reading, as there are some added sound effects, but here are the words to Negative Return:
Accessible (James Blunt ‘Beautiful’ parody lyrics)
Posted by Angela Brett in The Afterlife on January 23, 2018
I watched a speech by by Haben Girma yesterday, and as she was talking about making things accessible to people with disabilities and how that can lead to usefulness and innovations beyond accessibility, I decided to write a quick parody of James Bluntās āBeautifulā about accessibility. Here are the lyrics. They donāt always match the original tune exactly, but rather an approximation of it I have in my head from listening to parodies such as The Amateur Transplantsā Beautiful Song, Weird Alās Youāre Pitiful, and James Bluntās own My Triangle. Feel free to come up with your own additions to include other aspects of accessibility or other things which could be more accessible.
My widgetās brilliant
My venueās brilliant
Of that Iām sure
For all the people
I donāt ignore
I met someone who was different
And I knew Iād undershot
āCause I thought my plans were brilliant
and they were not
Accessible
Accessible
Accessible to all
To learn or say, in a different way
When one sense is essential
It makes sense to overhaul
So I fixed my stuff
It was not enough
I met more folk who tried and they still
found it tough
And I donāt think I can accommodate
But I have a goal now and I will innovate
Accessible
Accessible
Accessible to all
To simply manoeuvre, no matter how we move
Paralysed or pained or small
Still our movement shall not fall
la la la laā¦
Accessible
Accessible
Accessible to all
And the gains are shared with the unimpaired
Till thereās nothing that seems impossible
If you see, hear, feel the call
Make some tools; tear down a wall.
ā
Of course,Ā I can’t publish lyrics to a song about accessibility without mentioning The Accessibility Song by James Dempsey. If you didn’t like mine, try his, now also available along with his other songs about Cocoa development on iTunes:
Iāve actually seen the original song āBeautifulā performed live, since I randomly went to a James Blunt concert with some co-workers the very first time I was in Vienna. However, even then, I did not really listen to the words. I did while writing this, and realised just how weird and creepy it is. The protagonist is not telling his partner sheās beautiful, as a casual listener might assume, but rather singing to a woman he caught a glimpse of once on a train as if she were some great lost love, despite the fact that they never spoke to each other and she was already involved with someone. Itās essentially Jackson Park Express, presented as a romantic short film rather than a feature-length comedy.Ā With songs like this out there, no wonder random guys on the street sometimes think they can follow me home!
Unrelated to all this, Joey Marianer has once again sung some words I wrote! This time it’sĀ A Few Things Youāll Need for the Cruise, slightly changed to be about the fact that there was, at the time of publishing, exactly one month until JoCo Cruise 2018. There is now less than a month, but still room for you to join us!
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.
Please tell me if you do something cool with it.
Creative Output 