Tuesday, March 31, 2009

The Boys (of summer) Are Back

No embedding (can't figure that out yet), but listen: The Boys are Back in Town (Belle and Sebastian Cover)



No story, but I went up to Iberia (aka Siberia due to its northerly and somewhat out-of-the-way location) to snap some baseball photos. (Click on that photo to see a few more spring sports photos I've taken thusfar.)

They've got a great team this year (ranked 10th in Class 2) and some great history. In fact, all the small schools in the area have a good passion for baseball: they're too small to have football teams, so they play fall baseball instead.

More baseball is always a great thing.

I'm excited for the season to begin. At all levels. Look here: The Tigers dumped Sheffield today. Hallelujah, now Thames can start and hit his 40 home runs!

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Schoolhouse

I recently bought the Schoolhouse Rocks! Rocks compilation (and by "recently" I mean a few months ago). Mostly, the cover songs on the album are pretty faithful to the spirit of the original songs. For example, Pavement's version of "No More Kings" is straightforward (except maybe for some stuff at the end). As is Folk Implosion's of "I'm Just a Bill," despite being a bit more uptempo.

There's one song, though, that was weird even without a cover: "Little Twelvetoes".

First off, I'm not quite sure why they even included this song on the album. Does anyone remember this song? If you were to look back at your days of watching Saturday morning cartoons (when they resurrected the Cartoons on ABC in the mid-late 90s), which ones stand out? For me, the top three are probabaly the aforementioned "I'm Just a Bill," "Conjunction Junction," and maybe "Electricity," among others.

But it sure as shit isn't "Little Twelvetoes." I mean, I forgot all about the song until I started listening to Chavez and their cover of it.

Maybe it's because I'm still not quite sure what this song is about. I'm still not convinced it's an educational song. I think technically the purpose it to teach multiplication tables, especially (duh!) 12.

Except it doesn't do that. All it really does, in fact, is set up some imaginary system where some hillbilly finds an alien (I think) and says, "Well, if someone DID have 12 fingers, it WOULD be easier to multiply by 12, because they PROBABLY MIGHT have invented two other digits besides the ones we have already to stand for the other two numbers."

Confused already? Me too. I guess that might make for some freaky kind of science fiction scenario on an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. But how are kids supposed to learn anything from that?

The song doesn't really do anything beyond that. It's telling kids that they might as well stick to 10s instead of 12s because it will never get any easier, they will never have 12 toes.

Looking at the lyrics, the only time the song actually attempts to teach anything is at the very end, when it goes through the 12s:
One times 12 is twelve, two times 12 is 24.
Three times 12 is 36, four times 12 is 48, five times 12 is 60.
Six times 12 is 72, seven times 12 is 84.
Eight times 12 is 96, nine times 12 is 108, ten times 12 is 120.
Eleven times 12 is 132, and 12 times 12 is 144. WOW!
The problem is, it only goes through the numbers once. And there's a pinball machine in space. And the guy singing in the original song doesn't have a melody attached to this part, he just kinda says it.

If any one part of the song should have a better hook, it's this one. It's not really catchy, which it should be is to get kids to memorize it.

Which brings me to my point: Chavez and their outstanding version of the song, which is anything but.

I'm not sure if they picked the song or if whoever was organizing the comp told them to do "Little Twelvetoes," but either way it's an appropriate song for them, simply because they, like the song, were much forgotten about as a band.

And the more I listen to this song compared to the original version, I'm amazed at how they can get it to sound so different while keeping essentially the same structure. For example, the chorus is almost exactly the same.

It's the subtle differences, though, that make the song stand out from all the others in the compilation: The creepy backing vocals in said chorus. The main guitar riff. The part right after the chorus where they sing "Please come back again" and return from a piano riff to guitars.

Most important is the breakdown interlude in the middle where they go over the multiples of 12. It sounds like the alien being is actually transmitting the times tables down from his spacecraft, whereas in the original version it is all too obvious that its actually the voice of the narrator (mild-mannered jazz/folk musician Bob Dorough).

Like I said earlier, the other cover songs on the album don't sound too much different in tone from the originals (meaning, they're all pretty happy-sounding). This Chavez song, though, just obliterates any good-natured feel that I might get from watching the little hillbilly boy romp around in the original.

Instead, I get the same feeling I get when I'm listening to Coast-to-Coast A.M.-a little mysterious, a little wonderment and a little bit of incredulity.

Not that that's a bad thing-in fact, it's the very reason why its the best cover on the album. Few other things (on the covers album or off) do such things to your state of mind.

Sunday, March 08, 2009

Problems?

This morning I saw this strange message on a church marquee that I passed on my way to get coffee:

"Don't tell God about your problems. Tell your problems about God!"

I've tossed this around all day and I don't think it makes a lick of sense. If this "First Christian Church (of God, in Christ, or Whatever)" is trying to mess with the heads of passers-by with stupid logic and senseless wordplay, then they've succeeded.

Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Ten Second News

Maybe this will take longer than 10 seconds to read, but I got some front page treatment last week:


That's my photo, too. You can read that full story here.

There's more:

-Some recaps of district basketball action from last week can be found here, here, here and here.
-Posted some of my highlights from basketball season on the Collegian Writers' Blog.
-An entertaining (if I do say so myself) preview of the Dutch baseball team for our World Baseball Classic coverage over at Bugs and Cranks.
-Finally, been helping out a bit on the news side. One kinda shitty story about the census, and another fairly okay story about the digital TV transition.