Women Whistling Songs for Me To Appreciate

Having a blog, and with it, software to see where people are coming from and how often they are reading what you write, can be a bizarre experience sometimes. Early this morning, I was searching the referring links to see how people were finding the Optimistic Curmudgeon, and I found that someone had gotten here by Googling “women whistling songs for me to appreciate.”

It was such a great, strange phrase, I couldn’t imagine the circumstances that would bring someone to type those specific words. And, after having done that, what would draw them to the Curmudgeon once they saw the link?

I clicked on the URL for the referring link, and it brought me to that search. Not only had someone skipped from that page to the Curmudgeon, it was page 86 of the results Google had brought up for that particularly odd phrase. Apparently at some point, the Curmudgeon was ranked somewhere between 860 and 870 in terms of interest to people who wanted women to whistle songs they liked.

It had changed by the time I got there, and I actually had to add the word “optimistic” to my search to see how that came together. It comes from a ludicrous tangent in my interview with Zach Galifianakis, who is wonderful with ludicrous tangents. We somehow got onto the topic of whistling and the guy who whistled the Andy Griffith Show theme song (scroll down if you’ve been dying to hear Zach’s thoughts on that).

If you read this and you’re the person with the whistle fetish, I hope the Curmudgeon didn’t disappoint you. If you keep coming back, I’ll start to ask the comedians and musicians I interview about whistling. It’s not necessarily my thing, but when the public speaks, you have to listen.

OC-Ed: Random Thoughts

I try to stay away from random thoughts on this blog, but here are a couple of things I’ve been thinking about the past week.

If I have the story straight, Attorney General nominee Michael Mukasey isn’t sure that waterboarding is illegal torture. That seems dumb enough on the face of it – the worlds are mutually inclusive – but it gets worse.

President Bush and others in the Republican camp don’t think it’s fair to grill Mukasey about it because he hasn’t been briefed about it, so he can’t know if it’s torture or not. So, to sum up the administration’s official position on waterboarding and torture in general:

1. We’re not torturing anyone.
2. Only people with high level clearance can be briefed on whether or not waterboarding is torture. By the way, we’re not doing it, but only people with high level clearance to official U.S. policy will have access to the specifics of how waterboarding is done.
3. In other words, we know it’s torture, but Mukasey can’t possibly know until we tell him what we’ve (not) been doing and he reads how it’s (not) been done in great detail in the official record, so it’s unfair to ask him about it.

There you have it, clear as day. Stop asking Mukasey about waterboarding.

On a completely different note, I heard something during Game Three of the World Series that amused and puzzled me. I’m a fan of Warren Zevon’s music – the dark sense of humor, the grasp of history, the baritone to falsetto dripping with sarcasm. So anytime I happen upon a Zevon song in an unexpected place, it’s a pleasant surprise. His words are important. He was good at words, had a folkie’s appreciation for them and paid attention to them.

But I’m convinced no one has ever listened to the words of “Excitable Boy,” seemingly one of the more popular tunes marketers and programmers have taken out of context to use as background music. I’ve heard it as musak. I’ve heard it as incidental music. And during the Series, it was outro music behind a quick interview on the way to a commercial, conveniently cutting out before the vocals started. So before it winds up in a Burger King commercial, here are the lyrics, for your consideration:

Excitable Boy
Warren Zevon & LeRoy P. Marinell

Well, he went down to dinner in his Sunday best
Excitable boy, they all said
And he rubbed the pot roast all over his chest
Excitable boy, they all said

He took in the four a.m. show at the Clark
Excitable boy, they all said
And he bit the usherette's leg in the dark
Excitable boy, they all said

Well, he's just an excitable boy

He took little Suzie to the Junior Prom
Excitable boy, they all said
And he raped her and killed her, then he took her home
Excitable boy, they all said

Well, he's just an excitable boy

After ten long years they let him out of the home
Excitable boy, they all said
And he dug up her grave and built a cage with her bones
Excitable boy, they all said

Well, he's just an excitable boy

New stuff on the way

If anyone has come back here looking for updates, you may have noticed I haven’t posted in a few weeks. If you like what you’ve read, I’ll be posted regularly again soon. I have been busy with work and a vacation recently, but I’m also rethinking my approach a little. I don’t want this site to be a place where I deposit every useless thought that occurs to me, and believe me, there are a lot of them. I want this to be better crafted than that, and I have also been told that the content needs to reflect the title more readily, and I’d have to say I agree. I’d welcome any feedback about that, as well. Drop me a line at nick@nickzaino.com and tell me what you think.

Until then, here are a few random thoughts:

It’s depressing to me that there are ninety-six Romneys in the world, and they’re now traveling in a group stumping for Uncle Mitt. That’s apparently just the ninety-six who happen to have a summer to kill. Someone should paint “The Boys from Brazil” on their tour bus. I can’t even name ninety-six members of my family, living or dead.

George W. was out on his father’s boat, the Fidelity III, in Maine a few weekends ago. What happened to Fidelity I and II?

Democrats and Republicans are in full gerrymandering mode now, trying to redraw districts to maximize their election gains. Here’s another approach – think of some relevant ideas that might appeal to people in the districts as they exist now. That way, you won’t have to fart around with protractors and crayons.

Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has been showing off his rock band, the Capitol Offense, on the campaign trail. Does anything look more unnatural than a politician with a guitar?

I interviewed Mort Sahl for an article that appeared in the Boston Globe on Friday, and he had a couple of nuggets that may resurface here later in the context of a larger piece.

On trying to find comedy in current events:
“Life outdistanced art, unfortunately. You can’t use the exaggeration you used to because everything is credible.”

On his worldview:
“It’s optimistic but I don’t know if it’s justified.”

When I told him the philosophy of this blog, “Things suck, but they’ll get better.”
“It’s been a long intermission, I have to tell you. Especially in the comedy clubs.”

What the hell is an optimistic curmudgeon?

I'm an optimistic curmudgeon. It's how I've always described myself. The thinking goes something like this -- Things suck now, but they'll get better. Even if things get better by half every day, they'll never be perfect. So you keep looking for something else to solve to get as close as possible. The thought of perfection destroys itself -- once you think you've reached the pinnacle, you're done, you stop moving.

To that end, this site will feature humor and news, things that I can't find a place for in my capacity as a full-time freelance writer. For Wednesday, I'll be posting a piece about Boston comic Chris Coxen mucking up the works at the Last Comic Standing auditions in New York. Also on tap, a never published piece about a fantastic rock and roll singer/songwriter out of Cleveland by the name of Roger Hoover, and an extended draft of a story I wrote for Paste Magazine a couple of years back about editing books as my first job out of college.

I'm at sixteen cells now, and still splitting, so (almost) any feedback would be appreciated as this thing grows.

"It's the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong." -- Valentine, from Tom Stoppard's Arcadia