If You're Desperate and You Know It Clap Your Hands

It's funny how a song's musical style and emotional feel sometimes have nothing whatsoever to do with its lyrical content.

When you listen to the 472nd greatest song of all time, "Where Did Our Love Go?" by the Supremes, you may be tempted to clap your hands or move your feet...it's that kind of a bouncy, obviously-1964ish  pop song.

It's also a sad, desperate tale of abandonment.

Baby, baby

Baby don't leave me

Ooh, please don't leave me

All by myself

I've got this burning, burning

Yearning feelin' inside me

Ooh, deep inside me

And it hurts so bad

You came into my heart (baby, baby)

So tenderly

With a burning love (baby, baby)

That stings like a bee (baby, baby)

(Ooh baby, baby)

STD?

Then again, maybe the constant overuse of the word baby isn't coincidental.

Now that I surrender (baby, baby)

So helplessly

You now wanna leave (baby, baby)

Ooh, you wanna leave me (baby, baby)

(Ooh baby, baby)

Men can be such jerks.

How Will You Be Remembered?

There's nothing like a spring-time walk through a cemetery to help you feel alive.

(Can you say, "Neener neener!"?)

But it can be a sobering stroll, too. Consider the tombstone pictured here...

You've got to feel at least a little empathy and/or sympathy for Dian, and for at least three reasons:

     1.  She became a widow at the age of 52.

     2.  Her parents didn't know how to spell her name correctly.

     3.  While her husband, Randall, will be remembered as a woodworking craftsman, she will be forever immortalized as a number-cruncher. 

Or, perhaps, a cheese grater?

Aretha in Need Is a Franklin Indeed

Hey, fellow-babies, this is Dr. Dewey Fever comin' atcha loud and strong with Rolling Stone's 473rd-greatest song!

The Queen of Soul is making her first appearance on the countdown with a little ditty The Doctor had never heard before called "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man."

Now, at first listen, your musical physician figured this was a standard "treat me right and I'll treat you right" kind of song. I mean, dig this lyric:

Yeah-yeah they say that it's a man's world

But you can't prove that by me

And as long as we're together baby
Show some respect for me

Solid stuff, right? (And by the way, let's go ahead and get used to hearing the word respect from Aretha, because THAT song'll be showing up quite a bit higher on this list.)

But when I pulled up an actual copy of the words for this slow groove, it became clear that Mother Franklin is stepping WAY outside the norm.

The very first verse starts out inside the box...

Take me to heart and I'll always love you
And nobody can make me do wrong

...but the second half sounds a warning that the guy better not ignore:

Take me for granted leaving love unshown
Makes will power weak and temptation strong

And if there's any doubt in your mind what she's being tempted about, just listen to the chorus:

If you want a do right all day woman

You've gotta be a do right all night man

In other words, if you expect me to cook your food and clean your house, then you better be, in the words of Bernie Taupin, "wreckin' the sheets real fine."

Men...can you say "performance anxiety"? Booger!

A Gaggle of Not-Quite-Genuine G Words

A non-generous grouping from Almost the Dictionary: The Almost the Truth™ Dictionary of What Words Ought to Actually Mean: A Lexicon for Parallel Thinkers.

GAB (acronym)  -  Ginormous Association of Blatherers

Gabardine (n)  -  The official in charge of an alcohol-dispensing establishment designed to cater to homosexuals

Gable (n)  -  A male bovine creature that finds other male bovine creatures romantically attractive

Gadgetry (n)  -  A tenuous attempt to utilize a doodad

Gag (n)  -  A small joke or piece of comedic business that makes a person retch

Galant (n)  -  A female representative of social insects of the family Formicidae

Galaxy (adj)  -  Having the qualities of, or a similarity to, a female tree-cutter

Gallery (n)  -  A room, series of rooms, or building devoted to the exhibition and often the sale of young women

Gallon (clause)  -  Verbalized warning to the residents of a fraternity house when a female enters the hallway; "Examine your zippers! There's a gallon!"

Gyro (n)  -  A Greek sandwich designed to splatter tourists' clothing and destroy their confidence in being able to pronounce simple words

Advertisus Domesticalus Pharmacosity

How this post came to be:

     1.  Beloved and I have been streaming episodes of House M.D. and This Is Us through the NBC app on our Roku television.

     2.  Because of 1, we have been exposed to television ads, unlike when we indulge ourselves with ancient episodes of N.C.I.S. on Netflix.

     3.  Many of the ads we've been seeing because of 2 involve an attempt to get us to ask our prescription provider about how a particular drug might be the answer to all of our problems (except, of course, for the list of possible side effects, which often includes death).

     4.  I keep losing track of what's going on in the television show we're watching because I get caught up in the puzzle of how the farnsworth they come up with the brand names for some of those drugs being advertised.

And so, here's an attempt to make things right. What follows is a list of Brand Name > Generic Name > What It SHOULD Be Called for several symptom-stoppers.

• Carbatrol > carbamazepine > Tree Astounder
• Bystolic > nebivolol > Nebivo HaHaHa
• Biltricide (wait...isn't this a felony?) > praziquantel > Worms-B-Gone
• Alprolix Powder > coagulation factor ix > Clotto
• Allegra > fexofenadine > Dr. F. F. Nadine's Magic Elixer
• Adynovate > antihemophilic factor (recombinant) > NoBleedum
• Adagen > pegademase bovine > Flying Cow

Restroom Rules for Men

Social conventions show up in some of the most unusual places.

Take public restrooms.

Please.

Guy Rule #1:
If there are three urinals and none of them are occupied, do NOT walk up to the middle one. Seriously, if someone comes in after you, you are forcing them to stand beside you, which is uncomfortable at best, and depending on the degree to which you did it on purpose, also has a decidedly-creepy vibe.

Guy Rule #2:
Unless you came into the restroom together, already involved in a life-altering discussion, do not talk to anyone.

Gal Correlative InfoBit:
For the male of the species, performing basic biological functions within the confines of a restroom is not deemed an opportunity for social interaction.

Incongruous Bow to Proper Manners:
The other day, I was sitting in Stall Number One at my current place of employment, taking care of business. Two stalls down, a co-worker was involved in a boisterous celebration of digestion involving loud gurglings, explosive passings of gas, and several plops, splashes, and kersplooshes.

During a short pause in the proceedings, the occupant of Stall Number Three quietly burped...and said, "Excuse me."

Seriously?

That's kind of like Hitler blasting London to rubble then coming into a drugstore, reaching past you to get some aspirin off the shelf, and saying, "Pardon me."

474th Greatest Act of Hypocrisy of All Time

♫♪♪ "Here's a chance to dance our way out of our constrictions" ♪♪♫

George Clinton didn't have anything positive to say about disco. In no uncertain terms...terms that this blog has determined have no redeeming social value...he made it clear that disco was unimaginative, repetitive, blah, blah, blah.

And yet, in 1978, he pulled together a group of friends, collectively dubbed them "Funkadelic" and foisted seven minutes of disco upon the unsuspecting world. Oh sure, he mixed in just enough bass slapping to be able to call it "funk", but there's no denying that it's disco.

He called it "One Nation Under a Groove," and Rolling Stone called it the 474th greatest song of all time.

And I'm calling Rolling Stone on the carpet for putting this on their greatest-songs list with a straight face.