Keptin! He put creechurz een oor bodeez! To.... control oor minds!

If you don't recognize that, here's the audio. Yet this post has nothing to do with Ensign Chekhov but with my first poll in a long time, on the touchy little subject of....earworms.

You know the ones. A song gets in your head and you can't get it out. There really ought to be some serious audio/neuro/psychological research on this because it's very real.

I just finished mowing the front yard, to a very pleasant in-my-head rendition of Great Big Sea's "Something Beautiful." I know exactly where this came from: I-Tunes, which I was using to try to open an ewww-©protected .m4p download. When it went to save it, I saw my GBS folder list, the last thing I'd used the proggie for. That was enough to get the title track into my head for an hour.

There are also non-song cues that always work. My Mother the Car State requires me to wear a headset when using my mobile in the car. When I disconnect the set, the phone makes a two-note signal which is the exact sequence, tonal and beatwise, of the opening two notes of the theme from The Flintstones. For weeks until I figured out that subliminal, I wondered why I was walking around the office, half an hour later, going "Yabba. Dabba. Doo."

And then there are the really nasty infections. Mine, for the past couple of months, has been "I Wish I Could Go Back to College" from the Avenue Q soundtrack. No shit- I woke up today, and not for the first time, with this song being the first thing going through my head. And last night's dream was about work, so it's not a carryover from that. It's not my favorite song on the soundtrack, by no means the best song, but I don't particularly dislike it, either (or anyway I didn't until this all started). It's something about the chorus on the bridge of the song- or maybe the throwaway line "I wish I had taken more pictures...." which is crying out for a verse or three to finish it. Whatever. It's mine and I'm just accepting it until something better comes along. I pray it's not something worse, cause I've had those, and I am not going to think of them even long enough to write them down.

But you can.

I want your diseases. More importantly, I want your cures, if you've got them. If you have any intention of blaming me for any of this, I have three words for you: Go. No. Further.

( Warning: this poll, especially its answers, may cause severe earworm outbreak )

Technical ditticulfies I

Quite the day for things going bump on the computer. If you see two voice posts immediately behind this one, they're part of this story. Here goes.

I did manage to get one DVR recording of the Daily-Colbert dynamic duo from the other night- and promptly found myself utterly incapable of making another copy.  Turns out my CD-RW/DVD-play drive does not record DVD's; formatted or no, the disks show up on here as nonexistent.

This led to several plans, running more or less simultaneously:

( Plan A )

( Plan B )

I also have these lovely mementoes of the evening:





So thank you again, Annie and May and all of you for egging on our 2 seconds of fame. And if anyone else wants the download, I have a link I can send.  I think.

Technical dittifulties II

We weren't through with the bugs, though.

I got an email this afternoon from another of the Good People around these parts, thanatos_kalos, needing some voice assistance with a spoof video she's doing for a class project for her Masters'.  I'd passed on this previously mainly because my high-teknikul setup here lacked one vital thing: a microphone.

I rooted through drawers. I went to the neighbor's home to see if they might have a mike. No ruck.  But then I had a brilliant idear: phone it in.

I'd never done a phone post, but I knew, from some of you who have, that they come out on the other end in perfectly lovely .mp3 files.

( LJ Phone Home )