the blog quebecois

But there's gonna be trouble when I find out who stuck all these stupid sawhorses in my way.

To paraphrase Otto von Bismarck, if you like laws and sausages and rock music, you should never watch them being made.

This was an older song that we'd never recorded, maybe because it had one glaring flaw. That would have been the last line of the chorus (the one I've marked with an asterisk). The original lyrics have long since vanished, but I recall announcing that I refused to sing it -- at least that particular line -- from that moment forever on. It was that bad. Not obscene-bad -- just something that was intended to be clever and wasn't, a pimple on the nose of the prom queen. Nor would it scan, no matter how I twisted the syllables.

So eventually I crossed it out and scribbled in something to remind me to replace it. We ran through the song one more time, and guess what? The scribbled-in line fit perfectly, so we kept it. Laws and sausages and rock music.

And now you know . . . the rest of the story.

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[Verse]

I wasn't doing wrong
I was just too erratic
And it stood out
I said it stood out
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[Chorus]

Caught by computer
Snagged and tagged
Sorted and recorded
Coded Gulag

Captured by a keyboard
Magnetic pulse mindless
This next line I gotta change *
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[Verse]

I wasn't doing wrong
But you spat me out
It was innocent defiance
You figured it out

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[Chorus]
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[Verse]

I wasn't doing wrong
You selected my file
Put it to the side
For a little while

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[Verse]

[Chorus]

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I found an earlier copy of the song with the offending lyric. Considering the overall prescience of the song and its take on what was then the computer revolution, I was curious about what I had written, having no memory of it beyond the fact that it was awful. Did I counsel my putative listeners to sell everything they had and invest in an obscure company named Micro-soft (as it was punctuated back then)? Predict the iPad and the move to tablet computing?

Not exactly.

It was a piece of quasi-poetic dreck that had pretensions of profundity but little, if anything, to do with the song at hand. Come to think of it, it had little to do with any song ever written or contemplated. As my cousin said after hearing it, and I quote:

"Huh?"

CBC:

Former prime minister Paul Martin is calling for UN intervention in Libya.

Martin says the situation demands implementation of the principle of "responsibility to protect."

That's a UN-sanctioned philosophy that authorizes countries to intervene in nations where leaders are failing to protect citizens from mass atrocities.

I fail to see exactly how the U.N. is going to help by doing its usual thing of setting up child prostitution camps, but judging by the picture you're much closer to the situation than me.

One of my cousin's songs. We played keyboards about the same -- poorly -- but the way the recording process usually shook out, the duty largely fell to me. I had a secret advantage, though.

In my misbegotten youth, I wasted a couple of years learning the accordion, so the right hand fingering was natural to me (the left hand, not so much). It might also explain the occasional "Lady of Spain" and "Beer-Barrel Polka" riffs that crept into my efforts.