Bleh. Just bleh.

I should be happy, First Day of Spring and all yesterday, but it somehow just isn't happening. Having the bottom drop out of the thermometer, round about this time yesterday, certainly contributed; Eleanor and I had our first dinner (and an om nom one at that) of the season in the greenhouse last night, but by the time we got out there, she was in a parka and it wasn't the moment of seasonal vindication I'd have liked it to be.

Then last night was less than stellar on both ends of the sleep cycle; Eleanor with wakey-wakeys, me with a bushel-basket of weird dreams that was hard to shake.

Work was nasty, brutish but at least short. The work mail brought exactly one of, and the smallest of, the four incoming checks I've been expecting to get significant shit paid by month-end; meanwhile, the home mail just now brought a bill for the first payment on Emily's parent loan that is supposed to be in deferment, and a 10 percent upcharge from our snowplow contractor on account of the annual total having gone over 100 inches. We've only had THAT happen once or twice in all the years with this service, and I liken it to the old Chinese Communist party practice of sending a bill to the deceased's family for the cost of the bullet when they execute by firing squad.

Speaking of premature death: you may have briefly seen a filk-version of that hideous Friday, Friday song, before I took it private after deciding it was just a little TOO mean-spirited. After the way this day has gone, I may yet reopen the gates on that.  (At least one of you who's feeling equally homicidal today will get an email copy of it;)

About the only good things were (a) at least getting one regular cardio session in and (b) coming close to finishing reading my 12th book of the year. Even that, though, was less than stellar; Jonathan Franzen's one of those Oprah-approved New Yorker authors who everybody thinks is way hotter shit than I find him to be; he writes beautifully, but has now yet to give me a single redeeming character in over 1,000 printed pages of The Corrections and, now, Freedom for me to really LIKE while reading about him/her/them. I regard it as a pulp-filled swallow of castor oil, which I finished because it was good for me.

Now off for my weekly lower-body workout; if it approaches last Monday's, I'll be walking around for four days with legs feeling like they're made of cooked spaghetti.

ETAAnnnnnd.... the perfect ending to the perfect day; got to my class and found a gym bag with two sweaters and no shorts. Preferring not to test the waters of fashion statements, I headed home to eat. And, yes, drink.

In fact,.... fuggit. Here, have some 'Friday' filk. I just reopened the entry.

Coming soon to a brain cell near you:

"I'm sure you recognise this LOVVVVE-LY melody as 'Stranger in Paradise.' But did you know...."

That burned-in brain bit from a longago record commercial just came back to me, from God knows where, moments ago. It led, sadly, not to a Youtubable copy of it-



- but, at least, to this 2008 blog entry about the once-omnipresent commercial about it:

For anyone watching American television in the 1970s and 1980s, if they heard that phrase one time, they heard it a thousand times. There was no escaping this ad: a distinguished looking English gentleman, talking about how many popular melodies originated with “the great mawhstuhs” and how, through buying the LP collections 120 Music Masterpieces and 30 Piano Masterpieces, one could readily and cheaply obtain them all. We are informed that tunes such as “Full Moon and Empty Arms” originated with Rachmaninoff and “Tonight We Love” with Tchaikovsky. No matter that these pop adaptations of classics appeared on the pop charts of the 1930s and 1940s and were already in the 1970s well on their way to being forgotten; audiences in 2008 don’t even recognize these tunes by their popular aliases- they are more likely to know the originals from which they come.

True, dat. Yet the blogger from 2008 manages to cut even closer to my currently-besotted bone:

In one of the early seasons of Saturday Night Live, Dan Aykroyd performed a parody of this commercial, which opened with something like, “Hello, I am actor such-and-so, and I’ve been dead for six years. But this deal is so good, I had to come back and tell you about it.”

Erm, NOT true, dat. That bit was from the pre-SNL comedy album by Robert Klein which I just quoted here barely a week ago:)

The rest of the blogger's analysis, though, is spot-on:

Actually, Aykroyd’s parody was a bit premature; actor -not guitarist, and not composer - John Williams was still alive and kicking when Aykroyd’s skit was aired. However, Williams would die at age 80 in La Jolla, California, in June 1983, and as prognosticated, the commercial continued to run and run on television for a long time until the development of compact discs finally put 120 Music Masterpieces out of business; it was one of the longest running TV commercials in history. Williams was best known for his roles in supporting parts in Alfred Hitchcock films such as Dial M for Murder and To Catch a Thief and was a frequent flyer on series television. He even filled in once for Sebastian Cabot, portraying Mr. French on Family Affair.

This, therefore, was not the John Williams of Star Wars fame (or his earlier "Johnny Williams" incarnation who did the Lost in Space and Time Tunnel themes for Irwin Allen in the 1960s), nor even the John Williams who shared the Secret Policeman's Ball stage with Pete Townshend in 1979, but the one who played Chief Inspector Hubbard in Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder in 1953 and continued acting well into the careers of the other much younger Johns Williamses.

I'm still on for a pancake breakfast next Sunday, but it's clearly gonna be served up with a side order of three degrees of Kevin Bacon;)