Snake Patrick’s Day Song

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.

 

 

 

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Still In The Clown Car

I posted “Fossil Fuel’s Good Enough For Me” to Youtube at the beginning of March, but then WordPress and my new-to-me Macbook decided not to communicate. Eventually I posted a blog entry for that song on an old Windows machine on March 17. It’s still March 17, and a few days ago I found that I had to write another version of The Clown Car while there were still four Republicans running. The song itself wasn’t too hard, but I decided that using circus marches for fill between verses meant that I should use my best imitation of a circus band, meaning my Electronic Wind Instrument being a trumpet, a fluegelhorn, a baritone. a trombone, a tuba, and a piccolo. Alas that it was beyond my skill, so after throwing a couple of days at it, I just played two mandolin parts plus guitar and bass. And that is the recording that this links to. Note that when it went live, Marco Rubio was still officially in the race.

Fossil Fuel’s Good Enough For Me

It is fascinating, but annoying, how thoroughly some people reject the evidence for human-CO2-caused climate change. On one hand, there are the oilcos, whose scientists certainly know what is happening, somehow believing that a few more years of big profits is worth living on a wrecked planet afterward. Somehow, they managed to make a big part of Congress parrot the lie, and I have to assume that at least a few of them actually believe it. And the attitude of the poor people they are duping, that renewable power is something the liberal urban elite want and therefore a bad thing.

A big job to capture all of that in a short song, but here it is.

Today WordPress doesn’t want to show the image.

What If The Bundys Were Black?

Writing and posting topical songs is such a slow and sluggish way to change the world. Maybe I should just get some military-grade weaponry and round up a crowd of yahoos and invade a bird sanctuary. Oh wait, it’s been done. Darn!

Daddy Blew Santa Away

Here’s my Christmas song. As the title gives away, it’s about what happens when Santa gets to a Castle Doctrine household, As always, I “borrowed” images from the internet, but the writing and performance are all my own work.

A Family Thanksgiving

My family is far-flung and seldom gets together, but lots of my friends tell stories about Thanksgivings dominated or ruined by relatives on various lunatic fringes screaming about each others’ religion or politics. My song about just such a dinner came together really quickly, and I put in a slide show with famous or notorious right/left-wing personages being Aunt Flora, Uncle Ernest, et al. Extra points for catching the place where I sang “Aunt Ernest” and dragged in an “Uncle” from elsewhere in the song.

Don’t Let Them In

Here’s my take on the people who want to keep Syrian refugees out of the country. The recording/performing is a little rougher than usual because I was trying to get this thing in front of people quickly.

A Good Guy With Bacon

There’s lots of important and serious stuff to write about, but for some reason I was taken by the recently publicized lethality of bacon, as it relates to our weapon-toting culture. I sang this song over and over until the soggy bits had fallen off and discovered it was under two minutes long. But there it is on Youtube, with a slideshow including acknowledgement of my imaginary picking partners.

Death With Popcorn

My wife spent last month taking care of her dying sister. She asked me to write a song about the swallow-raw-popcorn-and-get-cremated meme, so I did. This arrangement makes heavy use of an Electronic Wind Instrument, demonstrating with painful clarity that anything more complicated than the Valkyries fanfare is . . . interesting. Here it is on Youtube.

Grandma’s A Pirate

Okay, sorta topical, because tomorrow is Talk Like A Pirate Day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I9u01nKI6cY