The Lydster, Part 128: Weird Al

The Daughter asked if I’ve done an ABC Wednesday Y is for Yankovic; why, yes, I have.

weirdalThe Daughter was introduced to Weird Al Yankovic on the release of his July 2014 album, Mandatory Fun, which opened at #1 on the Billboard charts, the first comedy album since 1963 to top the charts. She went away for about a week to Grandma and Grandpa’s house in mid-August, spending time with her 13 y.o. twin cousins and she comes home a Weird Al maven.

This is not a bad thing, mind you. I’ve been following the musician’s career for about three and a half decades, back when it was primarily him playing the accordion on songs such as My Bologna (parody of The Knack’s My Sharona) and Another One Rides the Bus (take on Queen’s Another One Bites the Dust)- versions you can hear HERE – before his sound got more sophisticated and full with I Love Rocky Road (Joan Jett’s I Love Rock and Roll), Eat It (Michael Jackson’s Beat It) and Ricky (an I Love Lucy pastiche based on Mickey by Toni Basil).

The Daughter asked if I’ve done an ABC Wednesday Y is for Yankovic; why, yes, I have.

She came up with her Top 10 videos. All of the songs can be found HERE except the newest ones, indicated with an *, which can be found on the Weird Al main page.

10. Handy* (home repair, based on Fancy by Iggy Azalea)
9. Like a Surgeon (based on Like a Virgin by Madonna)
8. Fat (based on Michael Jackson’s Bad)
7. Eat It
6. I Lost on JEOPARDY! (about the TV game show, based on the Greg Kihn Band’s Jeopardy)
5. White and Nerdy (parody of “Ridin'” by Chamillionaire)
4. Foil* (about the aluminum wrap, based on Royals by Lorde)
3. Word Crimes* (about linguistic sins, based on Blurred Lines by Robin Thicke)
2. Amish Paradise (based on Gangsta’s Paradise by Coolio)
1. First World Problems* (style parody of Pixies)

She challenged me to come up with my own list, but it’s so changeable. Here’s a snapshot in time:

10. Trapped In The Drive-Thru (based on Trapped in the Closet by R. Kelly)
9. Dare To Be Stupid (style parody of Devo)
8. Stop Forwarding This Crap To Me (style parody of Jim Steinman, who wrote a lot for Meat Loaf)
7. Tacky* (based on Happy by Pharrell Williams)
6. Gump (about the movie character Forrest Gump, based on Lump by The Presidents of the United States of America)
5. Mission Statement* (every business cliche you hate, a style parody of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)
4. Amish Paradise
3. I Lost on JEOPARDY! – since I have, this HAD to be on the list
2. Word Crimes*
1. Smells Like Nirvana (parody of Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana)

But her affection for Foil, Handy, and especially First World Problem may alter my list.

She also insisted that The Wife, less seeped in Yankovicmania, make her list:

5. Like A Surgeon
4. Fat
3. Eat It
2. Tacky
1. Word Crimes

August Rambling: Deep dark secrets

I wrote this blog post about my ambivalence about blogging on the Times Union website.

WD40
The Hook-Up Culture Is Getting 20-Somethings Nowhere. On the other hand, Casual Love.

How we get through life every day.

Nixon’s still the one. And What We Lost 40 Years Ago When Nixon Resigned. See Harry Shearer recreate Richard Nixon as he preps and delivers his resignation speech. Plus George Will Confirms Nixon’s Vietnam Treason.

New Zealand’s non-partisan Get Out the Vote campaign. I don’t see such things often in the US. Sure, there’s get our SUPPORTERS to vote, but that’s a different animal.

Deep Dark Fears is “a series of comics exploring those intimate, personal fears that mostly stem from your imagination getting darkly carried away.” Read more about it.

Rod Serling’s closing remarks from The Obsolete Man episode of The Twilight Zone. “It remains profoundly prescient and relevant.”

All these in a 48-hour period: How games’ lazy storytelling uses rape and violence against women as wallpaper and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has come forward with several stories of being called “chubby,” “fat,” and “porky” by her male colleagues in Congress and Fark prohibits misogyny in new addition to moderator guidelines and Snappy response to sexist harasser in the tech field.

Modern Office with Christina Hendricks.

FLOWCHART: Should You Catcall Her?

Guns and The Rule of Intended Consequences.

What our nightly views might look like if planets, instead of our moon, orbited Earth.

Cartoon: Pinocchio, Inc.

Remember when I wrote about flooding in Albany this month? Dan explains the systemic reason WHY it happened.

Arthur makes the case against “the case against time zones.” I’m not feeling the abolition of time zones either, at this point.

Nōtan: Dark and Light principles of Design.

The jungle gym as math tool.

The disaster drafts for professional sports.

The Procrastination Doom Loop—and How to Break It.

One of my favorite movie quotes, maybe because it’s so meta: “That’s part of your problem: you haven’t seen enough movies. All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.” (Grand Canyon, 1991)

Seriously, Rebecca Jade, the first niece, is in about four different groups, in a variety of genres. Here’s The Soultones cover band – Promo video. Plus a link to her latest release, Galaxy, with Jaz Williams.

Tosy’s U2, ranked 40-31 and 30-21.

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Paul McCartney and Heather Mills, 2004.

August 22, 1969: The Beatles’ Final Photo Shoot

Coverville 1043: The Elvis Costello Cover Story III, in honor of him turning 60.

4 chairs, 4 women; 4 women, no chairs.

12 billion light-years from the edge. A funny bit!

Don Pardo, R.I.P..

Lauren Bacall: always the life of the party. And cinema icon of Hollywood’s golden age, 1924-2014. A Dustbury recollection.

More Robin Williams: on ‘cowardice’ and compassion. Also, a Dan Meth drawing and Aladdin’s Broadway cast gave a him beautiful tribute. Plus, a meeting of Yarmy’s Army and Ulysses.

Jaquandor remembers little Quinn. Damn middle recording made me cry.

The Wellington Hotel Annex in Albany, N.Y. was… murdered in plain sight in front of hundreds of onlookers. “If I were a building, this is how I’d like to go.” Here’s another view.

SamuraiFrog’s Muppet jamboree: C is for Clodhoppers and D Is for Delbert (who evolved) and E is for Eric the Parrot and F is for a Fraggle and G Is for the Gogolala Jubilee Jugband.

New SCRABBLE words. Word Up has identified some of the new three-letter words.

I SO don’t care: one space or two after the period. Here’s a third choice.

The ultimate word on that “digital natives” crap.

Whatever Happened to the Metric System?

Freedom from fear.

Ever wondered what those books behind the glass doors of the cupboard might be thinking or feeling?

The New Yorker thinks Yankovic is weirdly popular.

Here’s a nice Billy Joel story.

Pop songs as sonnets.

House of Clerks, a parody of House of Cards.

Saturday Night Live Political Secrets Revealed.

This Sergio Aragonés masterpiece is included as a fold-out poster within Inside Mad. His priceless gift to all Mad fans shows over six decades of Mad contributors and ephemera within a mish-mash of Mad office walls. The only thing missing in this beautiful mess is a key. Doug Gilford will be attempting to label everything you see with brief (pop-up) descriptions and links to pertinent pages…

Hello Kitty is not a cat. You may have known that; somehow, I missed it.

You May Have Something Extremely Valuable Hiding In Your Change.

Improved names for everyday things

GOOGLE ALERTS (me)

I wrote this blog post about my ambivalence about blogging on the Times Union website. J. Eric Smith, who used to be a TU blogger, responds at length.

SamuraiFrog responds to my response to 16 Habits of Sensitive People. Also, per moi, he does his #1 songs on his birthday: 1987-1996 and 1997-2006, and 2007-2013. I’ll go back to this myself, eventually.

Dustbury on the theme song to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, which a passage in Schutte’s Mass resembles more than slightly. He discovers a Singapore McDonalds product.

Jaquandor answers my questions about vices such as swearing and politics/American exceptionalism.

He also writes of buckets and the dumping of the water therein, which Gordon thinks hurts nonprofits. Snopes, BTW, debunks the claim that 73 percent of donations to the ALS Association fund executive salaries and overhead.

Do you know that ABC Wednesday meme I mention with a great amount of regularity? I think this recent introduction I wrote explains it fairly well.

July Rambling: Weird Al, and the moon walk

I REALLY want to see the movie Life Itself, about Roger Ebert.

clock.numbers
Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. – George Orwell. To that end, Bible Stories for Newly Formed and Young Corporations and Congratulations: It’s a corporation.

An answer to the child immigrant problem at the US-Mexican border? I note that the Biblical Jesus was a refugee, his parents fleeing Herod’s wrath. Yet so many people who profess to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ “are so uncaring and hateful about hungry children trying to get to a better, safer place to live.”

In the non-surprise category: Stand Your Ground Laws Lead To More Homicides, Don’t Deter Crime.

Misleading on Marriage: how gay marriage opponents twist history to suit their agenda.

Yiddish Professor Miriam Isaacs has dug in a previously unknown treasure of over a thousand unknowns Yiddish songs recorded of Holocaust survivors; the text is in Swedish but can be translated. Miriam was my old racquetball buddy decades ago.

The Creation Myth of 20th Century Fundamentalism by Jeff Sharlet, who I also knew long ago.

Australian swimming great Ian Thorpe came out as gay. Arthur explains why it STILL matters. Also: I Can Be Christian, and Gay, and Live in Alabama.

Portraits of people in 7 days’ worth of their own garbage.

These next several feel of a piece, about understanding life and each other:
Amy B says This is not a bucket list.
It’s Not as Simple as it Seems: Neal Hagberg at TEDx Gustavus Adolphus College.
Technology has taken much away much.
I Dare You To Watch This Entire Video.
*She Sent All Her Text Messages in Calligraphy for a Week.

Our church, First Presbyterian Albany, hosted a work camp in the city the week leading to the 4th of July. Homes were repaired/painted throughout the city; 400+ youth and adults, from several states, including Hawaii, plus folks from Ontario, Canada, were hosted at Myers Middle School; 75+ First Pres folks volunteered to make it all happen. We received some media coverage, including one of the radio stations, WFLY present on opening day. Here’s the web link to the Times Union article. Plus nice coverage from a local public radio station.

The Importance of Eating Together.

Sinful, Scandalous C.S. Lewis, Joy, and the Incarnation.

Interview with Marion Meade, Dorothy Parker biographer.

Jaquandor, via George RR Martin, on writing. While he writes just one word at a time, I write five or six, accidentally leaving one out.

Why Readers, Scientifically, Are The Best People To Fall In Love With.

Why the Myers-Briggs test is totally meaningless.

whyteachmusic
Melanie plays with toys. So does Chuck Miller.

GayProf’s life continues at 40.

Is Dustbury, “prolific” as the inevitable consequence of a desire to maximize his output before the time comes when he cannot put out anything? And, I wondered, am I?

I realize that the 45th anniversary of the moon landing depressed me. Here’s part of the reason. Another part is that, despite disliking violence, I understand why Buzz Aldrin punched Bart Sibrel after being harassed by him suggesting that the July 1969 moonwalk was faked.

Cat Islands.

Louis Zamperini Was More Than A Hero.

Paul Mazursky wrote and directed Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1986), Moscow on the Hudson (1984), An Unmarried Woman (1978). But I saw (or heard) him in a number of TV shows and movies.

James Garner’s legacy: A commitment to civil rights and political activism.

Why I want to see the movie Life Itself, about Roger Ebert.

Check out this interview Rebecca Jade, my first niece, did recently through Voices of La Jolla. Click on the microphone/link on the upper right-hand corner to listen to the podcast.

Watching the new Weird Al Yankovic videos, especially Word Crimes. Weird Al is a marketing machine.

Did I mention that Paul McCartney came to Albany, NY? And Omaha, Nebraska? Who performed the mysterious ‘train song’ from the Beatles’ ‘A Hard Day’s Night’? The George Harrison Memorial Tree killed … by beetles.

Some of SamuraiFrog’s favorite Marvel stories; nice reveal in Fantastic Four #21. Also, for round 15 of ABC Wednesday – YOU can still join! – Mr. Frog will “highlight a different Muppet for each letter, hopefully, some of the lesser-known Muppets and milestones in Muppet history.” So far, A is for Arnold, who you WILL recognize; B is for Bobo the bear.

Superman and the Bible.

For the rest of the summer, absolutely everything new that’s published in the New Yorker will be unlocked. “Then, in the fall… an easier-to-use, logical, metered paywall.”

Renting Liechtenstein.

Could “The Big Bang Theory” get canceled? I’ve watched the show maybe thrice, but I find TV machinations interesting.

Mark Evanier wrote about The Battle of the Network Stars, some cheesy TV competition c. 1977. What struck me is that I knew every actor and the associated show from CBS, all but one from ABC, but had serious trouble with the NBC stars. Even I knew of the actor, say, Jane Seymour, I had no idea what show she was representing.

GOOGLE ALERTS (me)

Arthur responds to my TWO posts on Hobby Lobby.

Dustbury cites my Instant Runoff Voting post and my TMI post.

Mr. Frog tackles #1 Songs on My Birthday, which some of the rest of you regular bloggers – you know who you are – might consider.

(not me)
Alison Green, M.D. will join Green Family Practice Clinic on August 1st as the newest family practice doctor in Newport. “Alison joins the practice established by her father, Dr. Roger Green, continuing a rich family heritage of healthcare providers.”

(image from http://teachr.co/1oik2Qr )

U is for UHF

UHF managed to stick, in no small part because of the All-Channel Receiver Act in the early 1960s, requiring UHF capacity on TVs.

 

While researching a book about local television that I will almost certainly never write, I discovered that, after World War II, there was a great demand for having local television stations in the United States. TV in those days was limited to what was called VHF (very high frequency) of channels 1 to 13; eventually, channel 1 was reassigned. But with only 12 individual choices of TV stations, there were, inevitably, issues of station signals interfering with other broadcasts.

By 1949, there were just over 100 local stations in the country. While some large cities, such as New York and Los Angeles had four or more stations, other places had only one or two, and some places such as Denver, CO and Austin, TX had none.

So the Federal Communications Commission, the government body in charge of these things, instituted was called the Freeze of 1948, with over 700 applications waiting to be addressed, and only some already in the pipeline getting approved. The freeze was only supposed to have lasted a few months; it ended up taking four years.

By this time, the FCC had offered the stations the opportunity to broadcast on a different set of frequencies known as UHF, ultra high frequency, initially channels 14 through 83. There was only one little problem; most sets were not designed to access the UHF signal! As in any hardware/software balance issues of today, TV manufacturers didn’t want to make sets with UHF capacity unless there were enough stations broadcasting in UHF. And broadcasters didn’t want to invest in a UHF station unless there were enough sets that could air their signal.

There was one workaround: buying a converter. But would people pay for a device to get greater television access when they had been getting it for free? Eventually, UHF managed to stick, in no small part because of the All-Channel Receiver Act (ACRA) in the early 1960s, requiring UHF capacity on TVs. Unfortunately, before that happened, a wager by the Dumont network on the UHF technology eventually led to the network’s demise.

UHF was also clunky, even after the passage of the ACRA. While the set would click to each station between 2 and 13, the UHF dial was like a radio dial of that era, and tuning it to a given setting was a sometimes thing. This meant that getting an outside antenna was pretty much imperative.

Since UHF was less than prime viewing, stations on that end of the dial often broadcast old movies or other inexpensive productions. That was, more or less, the premise of the 1989 movie UHF, starring ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic. You can read the reviews and see the trailer and, at least for the time being, watch the whole movie.

One of the great successes of a UHF station was when entrepreneur Ted Turner bought the struggling television station in Atlanta on Channel 17 and eventually turned it into cable network TBS.

Of course, nowadays, people often DO pay for TV via cable, a dish, or other technologies. TV stations are broadcast digitally, so a given station can have 2 or more different signals. The technology is SO much sophisticated now.

ABC Wednesday – Round 11

Y is for Yankovic, “Weird Al” Yankovic

He got his parody tapes to radio personality Dr. Demento when Al was still a teenager and his career slowly took off.

 

I was flipping through the channels on a Saturday morning – unusual, that – when I came across a BIOGRAPHY Channel piece on “Weird Al” Yankovic, which I was oddly compelled to watch. Then I came across this Bat Segundo interview, a very interesting listen.

Most novelty acts last a year or three. So how is it that Weird Al has managed to mine the music parody gig for nearly three decades? Not only that, he is more successful than ever, up for two Grammy awards in February 2012 and having a 2011 Top 10 album. Yankovic’s success comes in part from his effective use of music video to further parody popular culture, the song’s original artist, and the original music videos themselves, scene-for-scene in some cases. There’s a whole YouTube channel of Weird Al songs out there, so it’s difficult to narrow the list.

As a kid starting on the accordion, the instrument of non-relative Frank Yankovic, Al learned to play an unusual version of rock and roll. He got his parody tapes to radio personality, Dr. Demento, when Al was still a teenager and his career slowly took off.

Al usually has three basic types of songs on his albums, of which I have a half dozen: those that parody a particular song with new lyrics, generally with the express permission of the original artist; original songs, often in the style of a given group; and the polka medley, where a bunch of songs are strung together.

For instance, compare Al’s Eat It with Beat It by Michael Jackson. Or Al’s Smells Like Nirvana with Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit. Many of the same sets and/or actors are used in both the original videos and Al’s renditions.

Just a handful of the parodies:
Ricky, a riff on the TV show I Love Lucy, taking the tune from Toni Basil’s Hey Mickey
Amish Paradise which came, via Coolio’s Gangsta Paradise, from Stevie Wonder’s Pastime Paradise
Gump, about the movie character Forrest Gump, based on the Presidents of the United States’ Lump
Polkas on 45, the first of the polka medleys
The Saga Begins, a Star Wars riff using Don McLean’s American Pie
And something I can really relate to:
I Lost On Jeopardy, based on Jeopardy by Greg Kihn, who’s in the last shot of Al’s video.

A 2011 non-parody tune contains an important message: Stop Forwarding That Crap To Me

As Wikipedia and the BIOGRAPHY special noted, Al tends to work clean. There are videos purporting to be Weird Al’s, usually “songs that are racist, sexually explicit, or otherwise offensive,” which often misspell his last name as Yankovich. So make sure you’re getting the real Weird Al Yankovic. This Funny or Die video isn’t really Al, but Al does appear in it in a small role.

From Correlated.org, a meaningless factoid: In general, 59 percent of people like Weird Al Yankovic. But among those whose primary home computer is not a laptop, 74 percent like Weird Al.
Based on a survey of 245 people whose primary home computer is not a laptop and 544 people in general.

ABC Wednesday – Round 9

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