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Oliver Cross: Pens from recycled car parts and silly songs
Enjoy the latest scribblings from Woodhouse resident and YEP columnist Oliver Cross.
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Masters of the silly song
I've spoken before of my admiration for the great American songwriters, part of my definition of a great American songwriter being one that's been dead for years and years.
One sub-division of the great American song-writing tradition is the gloriously, inventively, extravagantly and unashamedly silly song; the masters in the field being George and Ira Gershwin.
And I don't think (outside Gilbert and Sullivan, who George Gershwin apparently admired) that songs get much sillier than Just Another Rhumba (1937).
The song's protagonist, in this case played by Ella Fitzgerald, which is why I listen to it a lot, takes a trip to the West Indies, where she somehow becomes infected by a rhunba tune ('rhumba' being Ira's spelling) which, for reasons not fully explained, blights her life.
It's just another rhunba,
But it certainly has my numb-bah
So much that I can't sleep or slumb-bah
Can you imagine anything dumb-bah?
After asking herself several times 'Why did I have to succum-bah to that rhumba?' and singing lots of clever words in between, she recognises that there is no antidote and she's doomed. It would be a tragic song or a heavy blues if it wasn't for the fact that George and
Ira and Ella are enjoying themselves so much that you can't help but enjoy yourself too.
And all this is to tell you that there's a marvellous, though rather strange, version of the song by a clownish opera singer called Carmen Balthrop on You Tube which fully respects its inspired silliness and will probably cheer you up, or there's no hope.
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Sickening blast from the past
In illustration of the truth that things go round and sometimes slap you in the face, the Yorkshire Evening Post has issued company ballpoint pens which they are pleased, possibly to the point of smugness, to tell you are 'made from recycled car parts'.
Which might sound like a good thing, but not for me because I eat pen barrels; this is not sucking or chewing, it's eating like you might eat a stick of liquorice so there is nothing left but the metal point and the ink tube, which is usually empty, the ink having fully transferred itself in blobs to my face and hands so that one day I will be extensively bruised by a crazed attacker but nobody will take any notice with me because they will assume I've just been eating pens again.
And equally unluckily, it turns out that the YEP's recycled pens, if you eat them, taste and smell exactly like old cars, specifically the beaten-up 1950s and 60s Hillmans my father used to drive – a mix of rubber, bakelite, petrol, dent-filler and beige seat covers.
I know this taste and smell very well because for much of my childhood I suffered violent car sickness and had to breathe it in while lying curled-up on the car floor trying not to retch.
But I've been in recovery for about 50 years now and, until I ate the YEP pen, I thought it was all behind me. Now I just need to look at an office pen and I'm in danger of vomiting.
Really, the last thing a caring employer should have done is to force me to revisit my trauma just so as to score recycling Brownie points.
* Here's a silly joke which you have probably heard before but whose fault is that? Why do divers go backwards when leaving the diving boat? Because if they went forwards, they would still be on the boat.
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Saturday 19 May 2012
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