Here's a new song I wrote in Tahoe last week, and took a quick youtube of my initial practicing of it. It started out as a folk song, but evolved of its own volition into folk-reggae.
Two Feet Tall - Lyrics & Chords
EEsusEF#minB7 She was fated to be eliminated. EsusEF#minB7 She was bloated the day she was promoted. ABsusC#min She was flailin’ like a Palin, Dmaj7A And shining like a nickel, BsusC#min And feelin’ like New Zealan’, Dmaj7B7sus6B7B7sus6B7 While mining for a pickle.
She was grumpy and dressing pretty frumpy, She was angry at silly Lily Langtry. She was diving off the ivy, Then crashing on the pavement, And sobbing like a robin Dmaj7B7sus6B7B7sus6 D7/B While splashing cross the raiment. GF#min I love a girl who’s only two feet tall, Bmin7D7/B Her eggs are barren, but she cares about toaster ovens. GF# I like the curls that hide her prayer shawl. Bmin7 Her legs are buried deep in the earth’s crust, D7/BB7 D7/BB7 And I lost in her bust.
She was psychotic, and half-auto-erotic, She was mothering, so much so she was smothering. She was flying neath the oceans, While hiding from the fighting, And crying crystal potions, Confiding in the lightning.
I love a girl who’s only two feet tall, &c.
She was gorgeous as Florida’s mortgages. She could plagiarize, and she had a teenager’s thighs.
It's been a while since we've rounded up the search terms that led people to this blog. So without further ado, straight from our Statistical Department, is the top ten itwaslost-bound Google search terms:
1. curling jokes 2. firewhiskey recipe 3. michael jackson castration 4. purple flag 5. firewhiskey 6. itwaslost 7. famous non drivers 8. flag of the world 9. michael jackson castrat 10. black ram
In case you missed the significance, HOORAY! Michael Jackson's testicles are NO LONGER the top search idea leading people to this blog! (That and 'purple flag' were 1 & 2 for years.) That means, to give audiences what they want, we need to start producing more content about curling humor and Harry Potter recipes. Now, for fun, I went thru the long list and picked out the funniest search terms that led people here:
a hunks pennis albino alligator for sale ample mammaries castracted the 14 tears old boy cause i love him so much cloud fat woman shape dirtiest panties drinking corn whiskey girls taking hookah pictures great white marijuana sewer gator myth grindelwald release a handkerchief how to make corn likker how to make corn liqueur how to mix corn licquour james welsch porn man on manatee rhymes with smurfs shocking gelded men pics song socks with sandals the dirtiest panties ever vapid innocuous euphemisms very preggo we found it .org "dugong jokes" "get a fucking job is all" "giant tree trunk piece of ass"
Those are all culled from only the last month. This website has written about such a wide range of strange topics over the years, it's always surprising to see what people are out there looking for, and hopefully we helped them find it. M.M.M. suggested that "Man on Manatee" be the name of the next album for The Manna Tease. I love the concept of "corn liqueur." If we figure out how to make it, you'll read it here first. Also, I'm psyched that people are finding this website from searching for words that rhyme with 'smurf.' Good morning!
It's probably too late to make proper endorsements, half-way thru election day, since so many people vote early in California anyway. I'm nervous about the fate of Prop 19, which has been behind in the polls, & could be the last realistic time for awhile to end prohibition. The bloggers for itwaslost are more champagne drinkers & hookah smokers, not cannabis connoisseurs, but there's been a lot of good arguments everywhere why Prop 19 benefits the whole state, not just those who ever plan on smoking some pot legally. Former San Jose Police Chief Joseph McNamara has been campaigning from a law enforcement angle, he's written some good editorials & stars in this tv ad:
I also really liked the sound arguments laid down by the New York Times' Nicholas Krystof:
[...]Our nearly century-long experiment in banning marijuana has failed as abysmally as Prohibition did, and California may now be pioneering a saner approach. Sure, there are risks if California legalizes pot. But our present drug policy has three catastrophic consequences.
First, it squanders billions of dollars that might be better used for education. California now spends more money on prisons than on higher education. It spends about $216,000 per year on each juvenile detainee, and just $8,000 on each child in the troubled Oakland public school system.
Each year, some 750,000 Americans are arrested for possession of small amounts of marijuana. Is that really the optimal use of our police force?
In contrast, legalizing and taxing marijuana would bring in substantial sums that could be used to pay for schools, libraries or early childhood education. A Harvard economist, Jeffrey A. Miron, calculates that marijuana could generate $8.7 billion in tax revenue each year if legalized nationally, while legalization would also save the same sum annually in enforcement costs.
That’s a $17 billion swing in the nation’s finances — enough to send every 3- and 4-year-old in a poor family to a high-quality preschool. And that’s an investment that would improve education outcomes and reduce crime and drug use in the future — with enough left over to pay for an extensive nationwide campaign to discourage drug use.
The second big problem with the drug war is that it has exacerbated poverty and devastated the family structure of African-Americans. Partly that’s because drug laws are enforced inequitably. Black and Latino men are much more likely than whites to be stopped and searched and, when drugs are found, prosecuted.
Here in Los Angeles, blacks are arrested for marijuana possession at seven times the rate whites are, according to a study by the Drug Policy Alliance, which favors legalization. Yet surveys consistently find that young whites use marijuana at higher rates than young blacks.
Partly because of drug laws, a black man now has a one-in-three chance of serving time in prison at some point in his life, according to the Sentencing Project, a group that seeks reform in the criminal justice system. This makes it more difficult for black men to find jobs, more difficult for black women to find suitable husbands, and less common for black children to grow up in stable families with black male role models. So, sure, drugs have devastated black communities — but the remedy of criminal sentencing has made the situation worse.
He continues with more about crime and gangs and pot's risks.
There's also a really compelling environmental reason which not many people are discussing. It goes something along the lines of: Grow houses use a disgusting amount of electricity & water, much of it pirated from the grid. Let's let the sun do the work growing the state's pot! And if you don't believe there's untold thousands of grow houses peppered around California in every neighborhood, then there's some oregano in a baggy I'd like to sell you.
And lastly, a word about the opposition. Take for instance the wording of the Los Angeles Times' "No" endorsement: "The marijuana legalization measure is poorly thought out, badly crafted and replete with loopholes and contradictions." This is just something its opponents have made up, to make it sound like it was written by irresponsible stoners, knowing most of us aren't political enough to read the details of the bill ourselves. Exactly the opposite is true. The San Francisco Chronicle's Debra J Saunders wrote:
The establishment spin goes something like this: Even if marijuana legalization makes sense, Prop. 19 is so poorly written that voters must reject it.
Bunk. The measure is tightly written to give state and local governments unimpeded authority in deciding whether to allow the sale of marijuana, and if so, how to tax and regulate it.
There won't be a better bill. Marijuana prohibition enables and enriches criminal cartels and gangs. Californians have a chance to end the madness, and voters should grab it.
As for the Stoners Against 19 campaign, led by Dragonfly Whatshername, I don't even want to respond to them. It's naive! When you weigh, on one side, decriminalizing something millions of people do safely, versus, on the other side, things are fine as they are & omg what if tobacco companies want to sell pot!? then there's just no contest. Sure, having millions on non-criminals smoking pot illegally is a copacetic status quo. If you're white.
Then the poor are fed with honey cream, & a time for war profiteers, And escape from our system, Six feet above a five-foot cloth, up to our ears in reindeer tears, Up past our craniums in enriched uranium, Way down past crystal Istanbul, Down beyond the Jewish doughnut museum, I found you chewing your cud & I found you dead as Antietam.
Then the poor are fed with honey cream, mixed with Chartreuse, And more simple syrup. Tell me, Mr Nixon, why don't we surrender before we lose? Tell me, Mr Clinton, we know you're a sucker for toilet humor: We know you're gay as a rancher's stirrup, Away & forgotten, a dumpster rumor, Or a freegan minstrel, then the poor are removed like the galaxy's tumor.
Then the poor are fed with honey cream, I'm just staring across At the cross cleaving her buns,I can sit by the river & drink cappuccino & look lost: Men patriotically stand up & sing the Greenlandic National Anthem: "The way of matured civilizations "It is our zealous goal to bring home." I'll stay seated & drink slower & look like a lost phantom.
Then the poor are fed with honey cream, monstrously & atrociously silly, Monstrously misinformed & dead wrong, I'm just staring across at the pain in her belly, At the lindens at daybreak & the wise men grown wiser, Ask to shake a nation long, Naughtily molested by a fossil incisor, Ask politely to shake the dust of your flying carpet, ask her nicer.
Then the poor are fed with honey cream, stand up & sing, The yellow wing will pay one day, Ruminating past the farthest reach, orphans in the arms of the yellow wing, Write down your history my friends, point with feeling & gesticulate, And nothing will be okay, You wait for the library's circular heriditate, Learn the names on the gravestones, & be expelled & rusticated before it's too late.
Whilst playing that infamous zombie fast food card game, Give Me The Brain, I condescendingly referred to a traveling friend as "SHEFFIELD!"at a tense moment during the competition. Silence filled the room. Miss Williams is of course from Shropshire, far from Sheffield. The rest of the evening, other people were referred to as Sheffield, or as various other incorrect homelands. And as the weeks passed, my mistake faded into the half-remembered half-dreams & giselle grazing the Mid-Eastern steppes. Until this morning! when this e-mail landed in my inbox with a thud:
from
Miss E____ Williams_____@gmail.com
to
_@itwaslost.org
date
Fri, Feb 6, 2009 at 3:14 AM
subject
I'm blaming you
mailed-by
gmail.com
Just wanted you to know that you may have had a hand in determining my destiny. . . whilst filling in an application form in a panic, I was confronted with a last minute choice of location - London, easy, Birmingham, well why not, then. . . .SHEFFIELD. I have never been to the place. In fact, had you addressed me as "Leeds" or, heaven forbid "Crapstone", I might have ended up there, so, umm thanks, maybe.
So don't cross me, or I shall send you to some Northern English town.
No use to beat on the dull-drums Let's be imagina-tive, Each day is numbered No good when slumbered With only one life to live
-Ira Gershwin, lyrics to the Kurt Weill song "One Life to Live", from Lady in the Dark (1941)
Leighbor is a neighbor who does your labor. -Pele, from a gmail chat, 3 April 2008. Madam, I may be President of the United States, but my private life is nobody's damn business.
-21st President Chester A. Arthur
Attention to those of you with infinite patience for my increasingly surreal poetry readings, & home-computer recordings, oozing towards fulfilling a life goal of being included in the next Songs in the Key of Z. This may be the crown-jewel low point - my classic nonsense poem, Song of Dung & Defenestration, has been raped & mutilated, to the tune of my dying Yamaha PSR-500 Synthesizer. Mr Olaf Mary & Mr Epcar-Singer-Songwriter were kind enough to discover the accompaniment style "Soul Ballad #2", which is used to here to great effect. To read the original poem & hear an earlier recording of me chanting it, please visit this page: http://www.itwaslost.org/2007/10/song-of-dung-defenestration.html. To hear the Soul Ballad #2 Version, listen right here right now! It is also downloadable at this MySpace: http://www.myspace.com/ssandrigon. Or you can download it here.
And, as a weekend reading suggestion, Justin Davidson of New York Magazine discusses the oeuvre of the New York contemporary ensemble Alarm Will Sound, which includes several of my high-school friends. I can't wait to hear their nit-picky live version of Revolution #9, & the rest of their new 1969 project, which I'm told will include Berio's weird Beatles arrangements.
Returning to the forgotten idiom - folk prophetic epic doggerel American tragicomic nonsense-political murder ballad - I post my Song of Dung & Defenestration, sung a capella at the corner public house. What are you up to these days, James? Oh, nothing, just revisiting forgotten idioms.
Mellifluently, S. Sandrigon, prophetic poet & American National Bard
My fatigue for the next war is no accident, Hybrid helicopters have wounded my core & shield. In heaven, when the first female president Returns, her vulva will be snipped by the late James A. Garfield.
Are you ready for a Californian high-speed train? To marry L.A. & S.F. in a culture of two-&-a-half hours? I squeeze a lime in your cocktail of pain, I will block funding for all beehives & your precious oxalis flowers.
Let's just ask her, she says she means no discord, There's hummus all over her face, & blood on her token black cloak, She says the revolt of laboratory bunnies was never seeking its own reward, Now freeways usually clogged with traffic are choked in smoke.
When asked if she would attend the lost ballet, she danced a maidmarian, She objectified objective music, & cursed the fin de siècle, The politics of the super-rich are buried in carrion, And she was discovered at six a.m. in plainclothes leaving the residence of a sumo wrestler.
Her daughter published a book about pregnant teenaged mosquito lepers, It was a bestseller at Stanford, unlike the rest of you squares. Our Lady of Past Winter had the bibacity to drink the Watergate Papers, One righteous dude too many, a Knight of the Mannerheim Cross, & no one cares.
My man Tom was an avuncular uncle despite his penectomy, And after they were divorced, her hemorrhoids were tossed to the furnace, Leakage, Señor, poetry, however, arrogate my brain-child & blow me. Only edible Porcini? those pigs should be allowed to turn around & return as.
Angels, Albion, diaphany! - & not too soon, but where's our heroine? I hear her thru the wall discussing the coup. Fleeing from the bent sword & grooviness, never Matisse's supine ruin, My exclusive rights to programming cable soccer have been diluted due to the Russian flu.
She is seventeen years old, not so much eternally, but superficially. I wonder, does it grow new leafs as fast as it loses the old ones? Her voice-mail inbox is full, her anarchist friends are failing precipitously, A guest in the guest-house, modern juggling, ages golden but beholden of puns.
I have licked the fleshy part of her thigh for the penultimate time! So she will never be content with her secretaries, get them besmudged hence! The cheesiest composers have found words to rhyme with Argentina, But I loved her, the doctors know it, listen to them eructating the future's judgments.
This Hate Triangle - with Passenger Pigeons & the Bluebeard of the Silesian Railway - has vanished. The cabaret has gotten boring since they banned heterosexual can-cans. Like a muse, she advises me to keep repeating myself until I get noticed, And like a Borscht-belt comedian, to keep copying jokes from the Romans.
An uncanny funeral with an uncanny drumbeat, Her loudest broadcasts were insufficient to dike up the flashflood of Evangelical Environmentalism, Your dominion to the end of the earth, no puny feat, See your omniscience will hit the non-believers in the forehead as a sudden awesome paroxysm.
What were the motives for Hitler's vegetarian diet? But now that she is dead, & trashing the presidential suite at the Hotel Dis, I rejoice when the Western train is on time, & the road is spooky quiet, With the cows I ruminate our infinite hours, no, I remember only her pelvis.
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