And this one did got posted to Youtube yesterday, March 16, so now the blog is up to date. Somehow the idea of illustrating a song about St Patrick with pictures of every kind of snake in the U.S. hadn’t occurred to me before. I roughed out a couple of satirical verses and a vaguely Irish-sounding tune while I was sitting in the car and Fl!p was antiquing, then came how and found out there were well over a hundred species, so there would have to be mentions of “thirteen kinds of garter snakes” instead of listing them one by one. By cheating this way, I did shoehorn all of the snakes into just two choruses.
I know there are people who get really squicked by pictures of snakes, so I figured I’d choose a thumbnail slide that was a harmless cartoon and put on a content warning. What a surprise, Youtube served up three suggestions, all of them photos of real snakes. I replaced one of those slides with a cartoon and uploaded the thing again. This time, Youtube made an entirely different selection, but one of them was a cartoon about shutting down the government, so I picked that one even though that only gets mentioned once in the whole song.
This song is full of tongue twisters, so I had to sing it half a line at a time into a Left Vocal and Right Vocal track. I mixed them to pretend this is a feature instead of a flaw. Most of the snake pictures are copyrighted, and I left the notices on the corners of the pictures whenever I could.
