OK, like most of you folks out there, people stumble across my blog all the time by doing various web searches. Some are odd. Some make me wonder what people are actually searching for.
Back in August, I wrote a little piece about those flashing speed limit signs. I didn't think it was particularly funny, certainly not my best work, but we had encountered some of these on a recent road trip where hundreds of cars were speeding by and we had no idea which flashing MPH applied to which car. On a whim, I titled the piece with a lyric from a relatively obscure little song from 1971 (#3 on the charts for a few weeks) by an even more obscure group (2 top 40 hits) from Canada (I don't even want to talk about the cover by '80s hair band Tesla, the hacks), even though it had very little to do with the article I actually wrote.
Now, I've written about (or at least cited) Keith Emerson, Bo Diddley, David Bowie, Eric Clapton, The Band, Kiss, Deep Purple, and many, many other really big names in music. I'll admit that my post on Johnny Winter has been found by many web searches. For that matter, my quotes from Elwood P. Dowd have garnered lots of hits. I suppose this means that Elwood has as many followers as Johnny does, although he doesn't sing in the movie.
But it never even occurred to me that so many people wanted to know about Five Man Electrical Band and their hit "Signs". This is a song that contains such poetry as "so I got me a pen and a paper". Meter, thou art a cruel mistress.
Now bear in mind that when I go to Google Analytics and tell it that I want to see all my hits sorted by keyword, the first and overwhelmingly largest is always "(not set)". After that, there's "gilahi" and a couple of other obvious ones. That makes this pretty much the leader in my hit rate:
Apparently, the first 8 words of this song qualify as the biggest earworm epidemic in '70s music. Then there are a couple of people who aren't really into verbs:
Then there's quite a list of people who manage to at least two of the first three words right:
And then there's these:
"long haird"? "low hear freaky people"? "we are the freaky people"? (see subject)
Every single week I get more hits on these lyrics of a 38-year old song.
You have no idea how tempted I am to put a post out there that contains nothing but the opening lyrics to little-known, underappreciated songs from my heyday, just to watch the search numbers.
As a matter of fact...
Dale a tu cuerpo alegria...
A little past my time, but let's just see what that might do.
In order to help out these seekers of the truth, here are the entire lyrics to this song by a little band from Ottawa:
Signs
by Five Man Electrical Band
And the sign said long-haired freaky people
need not apply.
So I tucked my hair up under my hat
and I went in to ask him why.
He said, "You look like a fine upstanding young man.
I think you'll do."
So I took off my hat, I said, "Imagine that.
Huh, me working for you."
(chorus)
Sign, sign, everywhere a sign,
blocking out the scenery breakin' my mind.
Do this, don't do that.
Can't you read the sign?
And the sign said anybody caught trespassin'
would be shot on sight.
So I jumped on the fence and I yelled at the house,
"Hey! What gives you the right
to put up a fence to keep me out
but to keep Mother Nature in?
If God was here he'd tell you to your face,
man you're some kind of sinner."
(chorus)
Now hey you, mister, can't you read?
You've got to have a shirt and tie to get a seat.
You can't even watch, no, you can't eat.
You ain't supposed to be here.
Sign said you got to have a membership card to get inside. Ugh!
And the sign said, "Everybody Welcome.
Come in, kneel down and pray."
But when they passed around the plate at the end of it all,
I didn't have a penny to pay.
So I got me a pen and a paper
and I made up my own little sign.
It said, "Thank you, Lord, for thinking 'bout me.
I'm alive and doing fine."
(chorus)
To all you pilgrims out there in Internetland, your search is at an end. You are welcome.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
Who are these freaky people?
Thursday, August 14, 2008
And the sign said, "Long-haired freaky people..."
Didn't really need the "long-haired freaky people" part of that title, but I just really, really like the way it trips off the tongue. The Five Man Electrical Band is another underrated group I should've mentioned in a previous post. I understand they still reunite and tour occasionally. Great harmonies.
Anyway, that's not what this post is about. It's about a certain class of sign that I see popping up all over the place.
This may be something akin to saying, "the sky is blue" or "water is wet" but, I don't understand the DMV, or whoever it is that's responsible for these things.
First of all, they're often put up on heavily-traveled streets or even expressways. If you're flowing with traffic, how the heck are you supposed to know when the sign is indicating your speed? We were travelling last weekend in pretty heavy traffic when we passed one of these telling us that our speed was 68-72-75-77-66-80-72-71-79. If I'm doing 66 in a 65 zone, I don't much care. If I'm doing 79, I consider it pretty borderline. If I'm looking back and forth from my speedometer to the sign to try to figure out when it's pointing at me, then I'm not watching the road and I'm an accident waiting to happen, which is what I believe these signs actually accomplish.
Even if I'm in sparse traffic with one lane of traffic in either direction and it's obvious when the sign is indicating my speed, this tends to be my thought process:
- I'm speeding (I'm always speeding).
- Scan for a cop.
- No cop, keep going.
What's the real percentage of people out there that see these signs, know when they're being clocked, realize for the first time that they're speeding, and as a result of all this, slow down? I'm betting it's pretty darn low.
This, to me, would be much more effective:
But this is really overkill. When I see the cop car, I really don't need the sign telling me how fast I'm going. My guess is that this is also true of most drivers.
Finally, though, what's up with this one?
