No Means No, Yes? Maybe…

Following up on this post about country songs that annoy the fuck out of me, we have the Lori Morgan hit from 1993 (her biggest hit ever, according to Wikipedia), “What Part of No”.  The song starts with her telling some guy she’s there to unwind, that she’s not interested in a dance or in romance, but then it hits the second verse with these lyrics:

I appreciate the drink, and the rose was nice of you
I don’t mean to be so mean
But I don’t think I’m getting through
I don’t need company, no, I don’t wanna dance
So what part of “No” don’t you understand

While I don’t have sympathy for guys who can’t take a hint (especially with the implied threat of stalking and rape embedded in the song), you took the drink he bought you and you accepted the rose he gave you.  Is it any wonder the guy thinks he has a shot with you?  What part of “No” don’t you understand?
 

Limerick

There was a drag queen named Melinda
Whose favorite singer was Carlisle (Belinda)
But as a Go Go
She did a no no
And sang something from the Pretendas

 

Motorcycle Poetry — “November”

November

The pavement, streaked
Blood red and brown
Shards and moist bits scattered about

Cars drive through
Unseen, uncaring
Grinding to a paste
Smearing across the roadway

Nothing identifiable remain
Only streaks and smears
Waiting for a November rain to wash it away
Waiting for it to happen again

Some leaves have yet to fall

[“Motorcycle poetry”: imagery that comes to me and percolates into poetry while I am riding.]
 

Prhyme (definition)

Any word which has no known rhyme (in the same language).  A portmanteau of “prime” and “rhyme”.

A “prime number” is a number whose only divisors are 1 and the number itself: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 23, 101, etc.

Thus, a “prhyme” is a word whose only rhyme is the word itself.  (Maybe there should be a word-equivalent of the number 1, which rhymes with everything?  I guess it would be <whitespace>.)

(Looks like Prhyme is also the name of a metal/ska band and a rap/hip-hop artist.)
 

Is This Better When I’m Not Listening?

To date, there have only been three country songs that I actively despise.  (These would be “hit” songs, of course, ones with enough radio airplay to boost them from “I don’t like this but won’t likely hear it again” to “God, I hate this, change the station!  Make it stop!”)

Those would be:

• Tim McGraw’s “Don’t Take the Girl”, despised because of the bad poetry in the second verse.
   
• Colin Raye’s “That’s My Story (And I’m Sticking to It)”, his song about getting caught in a lie and just digging a deeper hole.
   
• Reba McEntire’s “She Thinks His Name is John”, about a woman who has a single instance of anonymous sex in her life and dies of AIDS because of it.

But they are now joined by a fourth, currently #1 on the Billboard Country charts, Blake Shelton’s “Who Are You When I’m Not Looking?” (also heard on Joe Nichols’ album from 2007, but not released as a single then — probably for good reason!).  Check out these first-verse lyrics:

My oh my, you’re so good-looking
Hold yourself together like a pair of bookends
But I’ve not tasted all your cooking
Who are you when I’m not looking?

Gack.  Make it stop.  Banal.  Insipid.  Lyrics that don’t add up to anything.  The second line doesn’t even rhyme.  (And I’m generally forgiving more forgiving about whether or not something rhymes when it is sung.)

No one has tasted all of my cooking, hon, not even me!  I keep making new stuff.  That pan-fried tilapia with paprika and bacon fat last night was nummy.
 

Do Your Religion and Politics Extend to Your Pets?

Coming into work today, I was following a bus with an ad from the Humane Society (or maybe the SPCA) featuring a cat nursing a scad of kittens, labelled “Spay Me”, with a subtitle saying that family planning isn’t just for humans.

(It was totally LOLCat-able.  Photoshop the mama cat’s eyes a little bigger and add a word balloon saying “Please.  And soon.”)

It reminded me of a thought that came up a few weeks ago:

Do pro-lifers spay and neuter?

Spaying and neutering pets has long been a standard concept put forward by animal and pet groups.  I don’t think I have ever heard anyone take a stance against it, making it one of the (in theory) most non-controversial pieces of social messaging out there.

(I despise using the term “fixed”, though.  The pets are not broken.  You can argue that it is “fixed” as in “stabilized”, but few people think of that definition first.  It’s like using “catholic” when you mean “broad” or “universal”: everyone will have to work past the religious meaning to get at what you really mean, so why make them work that hard?  Unless you’re writing poetry, of course; you’re supposed to make people work hard to figure out what the fuck you really mean with poetry.  [Kidding.]  [No, I’m not.])

But with pro-life/anti-abortion people, though: for the extreme among them, any mention of “family planning” seems to inflame them.  And what is spaying/neutering, really, but abortion in advance?

I don’t know.  There is undoubtedly a theological difference between a fetus (post-conception) and an egg and sperm which don’t get together, but what about when it is the work of man keeping them from getting together?  The political philosophy is generally opposed to condoms and other birth control methods as well, under the belief that man blocking God’s will is wrong.  So following that logic, forced sterilization of a human — preventing the possibility of conception — should also be wrong.  (Presumably there are levels of wrong: abortion is worse than birth control, which I guess should be about parallel to sterilization, so long as you ignore the invasive/permanentness of it.)

(Hmm: is getting a vasectomy a sin?)

So back to the pets: if you’re opposed to birth control and to forced sterilization in humans, does that religio-political philosophy extend to your pets?  Should you be opposed to spay and neuter services because they are a form of birth control?  Or are they somehow okay because pets are dumb animals/lower lifeforms/unable to control themselves/creatures with no souls/whatever?

Talking about this with a co-worker, he did say he knew a pro-life couple who doesn’t spay/neuter their pets, so apparently some people follow this through at all levels, but they apparently keep pretty quiet about it.  (It’s hard to imagine people out picketing the Humane Society in opposition to spay/neuter services, isn’t it?)

Of course, we can flip this whole thing around from the right end of the spectrum to the left end: cats and dogs are carnivores, or carni-omnivores at best.  If you’ve decided to be vegetarian or vegan, do you require that of/force that on your pet as well?  (Myself, I can’t imagine a cat being happy with tofu and brown rice with a side of stewed lentils, instead of tuna.)
 

Limerick: Isadora Duncan

Sweet Isadora Duncan
Talented, cute little punkin’
     A wheel caught her scarf
     Tore her head quite in half
They knew ’cause they heard the ker-plunkin’

This morning, I was riding the scooter to work and realized that the high temps coming up are all in the 50s — we’re past the last days this year we can even pretend it is warm, although neither is it outright cold, just verging into that ugly cool damp zone — so it’s time to dig out a scarf.  Another few weeks and I’ll be layering a sweater under the jacket every day, and putting the extra lining into my blue motorcycle jacket.  Sigh.

Info on Isadora Duncan.
 

Bad Song Poetry

I’ve never really been one who enjoys reading poetry, but I do enjoy certain poetic forms when done well (haiku, especially), and by extension, I despise them when they are done poorly.  Song lyrics, of course, are a small subset of poetry, and in most cases, the poetic nature of them tends to just wash on by.  But not always.

One of the few country-western songs that just drives me around the bend is Tim McGraw’s “Don’t Take the Girl” (which I heard on the radio this morning, and thus was made worthy of bitching about here), because of a lyrical line break in the second verse.  There is a term called “enjambment”, dealing with breaking phrases between lines.  When done well, this can add extra depth to a poem.  When done poorly, you get horrors like this:

He kissed her lips in
Front of the picture show

*shudder*  No value is added here, and because of how song lyrics will expand or contract the length and placement of the syllables to go with the music, the word “in” could easily have been shifted to the next line and not broken the prepositional phrase.

What makes this song more notable in this arena, though, is that the third verse does superb enjambment, where the second line of these three works syntactically with both the line before and the line after:

I’ll gladly take her place
If you’ll let me
Make this my last request

For the record, the other two country songs that I utterly despise — but for thematic reasons rather than poetic ones — are Collin Raye’s “That’s My Story (And I’m Sticking to It)” (the “It’s okay to lie to your wife” song) and Reba McEntire’s “She Thinks His Name Was John” (which tells us that casual sex, just once, will give you AIDS and you will die).  Play those and I change the channel; I merely bitch with the Tim McGraw song.

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Updated links of March 2, 2011
 

Coffee Houses (haiku)

Too many choices.
Low fat.  No whip.  Soy chai.  Bah!
“Grande drip with room.”