primeideal

When you were thinking about creating a historical baseball vid, loosely inspired by but not really a vid of historical baseball RPF, the song you were thinking of was "Turn, Turn, Turn!"

It's unlikely I'll actually wind up doing this, I'm not a vid person, but I had specific ideas, thought about it several months later and was like "I know I had a specific idea and I can think of several songs that are adjacent, but not quite it," figured "it'll occur to me when I'm thinking of something else, my pop culture knowledge is not that extensive," several months after that I was actually thinking about the specific source and like...to everything there is a season, a time to be born and a time to die...oh.

Anyway. Writing it down so I don't forget. Just in case.

Couple interesting links from File 770 the other day. The hotel that hosted Shore Leave (and several other cons I have not attended) is closing in a couple months. "Many fans noticed the hotel was not being invested in since 2018" I was only there briefly but I can confirm the AC was...not invested in. :( Sounds like it has a lot of good memories.

I thought this link was interesting, less so the parts about AI and more so the parts about resentment. Because I'm definitely the kind of person who is always bouncing between different creative projects for fun, whether that be fanfic, roleplaying, poetry, conlanging, whatever...but I've also been that person kind of wistfully staring at "real" writers and thinking, "I wish that was me, but it's probably too late, there are so many people like me that I'll never make it." And, like, that's not true! Part of the reason why I was lurking File 770 was because I'd actually gotten some good news about another submission and now I'm getting hyped for that! But it's a good reminder to tell myself, even when I'm feeling that way, a. don't take it out on other people (I think I'm pretty good about this), and b. let that be an urge to push myself forward. Every creative person needs a healthy level of "you know what, dang it, my ideas are at least as good as some of the stuff out there, if they can do it, so can I!"

Okay, so the other day I'm at the Nationals baseball game in Washington DC. And all the home team players have their own walk-up music (batters) or entering-the-game-in-relief music (pitchers). Some of them are punny. Like, Alex Call is "Call Me Maybe." Jacob Young is "Forever Young" (by Alphaville, not the Bob Dylan song or the will.i.am remix). And then there's relief pitcher Hunter Harvey.

( political topics discussed in snarky ways )

This week in my family's music league competition, one of the entries was "Should I Stay Or Should I Go." I enjoy Stranger Things, where that song is a plot point, and my parents are Clash fans so I've heard it around. But what caught my attention this go-round was the Spanish language lyrics in the background. According to Genius, one member decided he liked Spanish, so he called up the tape operator's mother, who speaks Ecuadorian Spanish.

They translate "so ya gotta let me know" as "Me tienes que decir," which is literally something like "you have to tell me"--this seems to be very accurate as well as fitting the meter well, so thumbs up there. The reasoning I'm mentioning this is because somewhere along the way, and I don't know whether I subconsciously knew about the actual Spanish or what, somehow a rough translation of a few lines got into my head.

Me tienes que decir;
Si yo voy, habrá problemas;
Si yo quedo, yo tendré más.

Very roughly:
You have to tell me:
Should I stay? Should I go?

If I go, there will be problems:
If I stay, there will be more [problems].

Paralleling:
So ya gotta let me know
Should I stay or should I go?

If I go, there will be trouble
If I stay, there will be double

And, if my pronunciation is correct, the Spanish lines roughly fit the meter as well as appear to rhyme in Spanish.

So did I just, one day, stumble upon this rhyme and think "hey this sounds like pretty good translation, I'm awesome" and keep it rolling around in the back of my head? That sounds like something I would do. But did I not know there were actual Spanish lyrics, and most of them are not correct? Maybe I just...never got as far as verse three? I don't know.

When it comes to great Christmas albums, for me a front-runner is "The Bells of Dublin" by Irish folk music group The Chieftains and some of their collaborators. My parents (who are, like me, both left-wing Christians) have a well-loved CD copy that has some "skips" from lots of play. I'm pretty sure my dad had the cassette version from 1991 until recently, it might have gotten disposed of during some spring cleaning.

Why is it good? Well, it features a great mix of new and old music, as well as religious and secular songs. There are bells ringing in a cathedral, and there's an original Elvis Costello song about poisoning your relatives the day after Christmas. There's multiple versions of a song about hunting a wren, and an English/Latin mashup about eating a boar's head.

Amid all these great songs, there's one that I think is...pretty terrible, and the juxtaposition of it with the good ones just makes it look more terrible. Below the cut (for religious/political discussion), screwed-up digressions about how my mind works.

( 'The Rebel Jesus' by Jackson Browne )

On the upside, the accompaniment with the Irish music is very nice??