Wednesday, September 21, 2011

Music That Fits Way Too Well With Unrelated Things

Sometimes, songs you love to listen to can remind you of things that you never thought they would. These songs are all on my iPod, and have given me revelations when I listen to them. They sound a lot like the plots, characters, or scenes from other things- and that's just weird.

1. Mamma Mia - Super Mario Bros.

It's not enough that Mario cries "Mamma mia!" when he dies. It's not enough that he's Italian, and "Mamma Mia" is vaguely Italian somehow. It's also not enough that linking Nintendo to ABBA is really cool.
It is enough, however, that this song is an epic chronicle of his love with Peach.


"Mamma mia, here I go again! My my, how can I resist you?"

The song begins with Mario's lament of, "I've been cheated by you since I don't know when! So I made up my mind, it must come to an end. Look at me now, will I ever learn?"

This, of course, is chronicling the never-really-explained existence of Bowser Jr. Mario's only options are to go on the Maury show, or admit that his beloved princess had a baby with the villain. However, he can't stop going to save her- that would make for a bad game, but it also makes for a good song.

2. Build Me Up, Buttercup and The Princess Bride

Admittedly, this song doesn't fit with the whole movie. It fits perfectly, however, with the beginning, when Wesley is just addressed as "FARM BOY? FAAARM BOY? WILL YOU _______?" and he loves her anyways. Not to mention, it has her name in it.

"FARM BOY?"
Poor Wesley's stuck doing her bidding, although luckily for him she's hot. The song begins "Why do you build me up (build me up), Buttercup baby, just to let me down (let me down) and mess me around?"

He doesn't know. She doesn't either. That's not unusual teenage love, but in this case it's true love, so it's okay that at first she's a manipulative harpy.

"Polish my saddle? I want to see my face shining in it."
3. E.T. - Doctor Who

Now, maybe this is biased because of my unwavering love and adoration of David Tennant. But I've been affirmed by friends that this song is, indeed, about having sex with Doctor Who. We may never know who's the sidekick who got to do it (Amy seems to have gotten pretty close, with the making out on her wedding night and all. But so did Kylie Minogue, whatever her character was.), but someone humped the Doctor.


Boy, you're an alien. 

The song's bridge simply says, "You're from a whole other world / A different dimension / You open my eyes / And I'm ready to go / Lead me into the light".

That is obviously meant to be the Doctor. He is indeed from another world, and he can travel through time (good enough to be dimensions, right? Right.).

Although, Katy does get some things wrong. Namely, she says "You're so supersonic / Wanna feel your powers / Stun me with your laser" when only the supersonic part is right. It's not a laser screwdriver, that would be stupid. It's a sonic screwdriver.

4. Carry On My Wayward Son - The Prince Of Egypt

Yes. Yes, Kansas can totally write a song about Moses and not know it. And I don't mean the actual bible, either- I'm writing about the Dreamworks movie. (The Bible tends to have worse screenshots for me to use.)

Also, I'm totally backed up by this Christian lyrics site. Even though it has no lyrics there. But it's on there, and nobody would have clicked that link anyways!

Not to mention that it sounds a lot cooler when you mute your TV for the river lullaby scene and play this song. Try it, I dare you.

The face of Kansas.
"Carry on my wayward son, there'll be peace when you are done. Lay your weary head to rest, don't you cry no more."

B'AWWW. IT'S SO BEAUTIFUL.

5. Every song by the band Scrum - World of Warcraft Dwarves

Scrum goes from serious beautiful music ("Caledonia") to a song called "The Scotsman's Kilt" about a man wearing nothing under his kilt, passing out on the street, and getting said kilt lifted up by "two young and bonny lasses". For fear of parents, I'll leave it at that.


This was on the Blizzard site when they announced a new festival ingame: Brewfest. If you know Oktoberfest, you know what goes on in Brewfest.
Dwarves are famous for their drinking skills. Scrum sings about drinking. They even have bagpipes! Since the WoW dwarves are supposed to be Scottish, this fits pretty much perfectly.

"The weather's always fine-- no rain in the pub!"

There's never rain if you're too drunk to notice! - paraphrased from Scrum lyrics

Saturday, September 17, 2011

Good Night, Sweet GPA

Today I tried to put all my notes from the book 1984 (all right, or maybe the first 20 pages of part 1 of the book 1984) into my Reader's Journal, i.e. hand-write them into a notebook.

Screw you, you smiley, horrible "I'm done with my essay!" person.

So far I have 3/4 of a page of my notebook filled, and I am on page 9 of 337 (counting foreword and afterword). It's okay for me to be writing this post instead of doing work, however, because I have 33 minutes until I have to go drive for two hours! Yaaay, a reason not to do work!

Along with writing up my 1984 notes, I have to translate Latin into English. It's like doing the Necronomicon to raise zombies on the pages of a dictionary. And I have to do math. Fuck math. It's not like it was in 7th grade when it was easy to do. Now it's ABSOLUTE VALUES.

("Absolut Value" is the price of a bottle of Absolut vodka, according to the kid who sits next to me. You can use that on your next test, feel free.)



"Yeah, so like, you subtract the price of the beer bong from the price of the rum you spiked the punch with..."

But the real bad thing is the fact that while working, I have to listen to my freshman brother whine about writing a page-long essay that's a week late. I want to scream at him, "NO, YOUR HOMEWORK ISN'T HARD. LEAVE ME AND MY AP CLASSES ALONE, YOU NON-HONORS-TAKING WHINEY FUZZBALL." But I can't, because that's not polite.

"I HAVE TO USE MLA FORMAT? WHAT IS MLA? HOW DO I TYPE? HOW DID THIS GET HERE I AM NOT GOOD WITH COMPUTER"

Just listening to this makes me revert to being a six-year-old. Not in a good way, even if my six-year-old times mostly consisted of me writing songs about "horses everywhere" and "Bears are good nature!" (Not good-natured. Good. Nature. As in, "This is a good example of one part of an ecosystem and I would like to point out to you their significance in both the deciduous and coniferous forest biospheres.")

I used to have fun on the weekends.

But now, instead of writing happy songs about bears, the last song I had any part in writing (okay, so maybe I had no part in writing it, but I was in the group!) was a rap that was in the meter and rhyme scheme of the Aeneid, but about the Battle Of Actium. (My group got 100% on that project.)

At least we still get to use colored pencils.

Not the same as crayons, but almost as awesome.

Friday, September 9, 2011

The Chill Teacher

Teachers can be too strict. They can be absolutely batshit insane (I once had one who claimed that he liked to take out his rebreather (?) underwater and take naps, along with claiming that he had both lost 20 pounds and ate 30 chickens over Thanksgiving). But the teachers who're chill and cool with everything can't be too bad, right? No. No, the teachers that are too chill and relaxed are just as bad as the very strict teachers.

I think that to identify a Chill Teacher, you should look at their facial hair. They should have a beard, mustache, or a five o'clock shadow that betrays their attempt to grow a beard. They will also wear clothes from the sixties or earlier, or from the 90s and later. They will never touch the 70s or 80s, because anyone who does does not count as a Chill Teacher, but as a batshit crazy person.

Now, some of them must also be women, but I've never had one. Therefore my expertise on this area isn't exactly there, at all, whatsoever. So the Chill Teacher is, in my mind, Walt Whitman in that photo below. (I learned about him from a Chill Teacher.)


You can tell he is, because he has a cool beard.

The Chill Teacher that I've had was great for the first month. Everyone loved him. He was the best teacher- mostly because he never taught. Somehow it was considered an honors class, which I guess is how they can assume that we could teach ourselves from the book. Then, slowly, once he began to assign essays every other day.. We began to rebel and hate him.
He never graded those essays, the ones we worked so hard on. He lost them, he forgot to do them, and he gave us good grades only if he liked us. It slowly broke us down, and we dissolved from happy-go-lucky, adorable little sophomores into sobbing, stressed out, fury-filled almost-juniors.


The average American Studies student.

With the work ethic my schooling has given me, I'm going to stop writing now because I feel like this is enough to maaybe get me a low C if it was graded.

Good enough.


Yeah, whatever.