Where do you stand on this most important of issues? Scott Adams is against it. Scott Adams thinks that

Car singers believe they have an unalienable right to sing along with the music even if it does make other people feel as if squirrel-banshees have crawled inside their skulls to eat the parts of their brains that control joy.

I think that car singing is one of the ways that we can proclaim loudly to the world that we are alive and life is good. In the words of Mellisa Ethelridge (IIRC),

ay aya aya heye ay aya hey hey

There is no finer moment in life than when you are in a car full of people and suddenly everyone knows the words to a somewhat obscure song and joins in with wild abandon.

Particular episodes that come to mind:

• In the Ghetto with the Kendalls. I thought I was the only one in the world who still likes Elvis but it turned out that In the Ghetto was Harry’s favourite song - as it was mine when I was his age.
• Jazz joining in with Cecilia - how did she know that? I haven’t played Simon and Garfunkel for years
• Georgina knowing all the words to Paradise by the Dashboard light. All my life I dreamed of meeting a woman who would sing Paradise with me as a duet and it turned out that I had already married her! (We used to harmonize on Emotion (actually, she would harmonize, I just sang) but she won’t sing that one any more)
• You were meant for me with assorted people from Alphablox that I barely knew on on the way to the pub from a company outing to Great America

… and my all time favourite…

• Conducting the whole company to sing Bohemian Rhapsody on the bus on the way back from Monterey

[OK - the radio wasn't even playing on the last one but it was marvellous]

I used to love to own books. Everytime I went to the bookshop, I would buy 4 or 5. I can’t bear to throw them or give them away - even the crap ones. I have no space in my house for any more books. Georgina doesn’t see the point. She goes to the library to get books and takes them back when she has read them.

A couple of years ago, I signed up for BookCrossing. The idea is that when you are done with a book you set it free - you just leave it in some public place and put a note on the web site (Bleak House. 3rd bench on the left, Liberty Park, My Town). I never actually set any books free because I couldn’t let go. The will to own them was too great to overcome.

With movies, the opposite is true. I have very little desire to own them; I rent them on PPV or through Netflix instead. They cost about the same as books and the reading/viewing frequency is about the same for books/movies. Why do I want to own books but not movies? Makes no sense to me.

Anyway, in my life so far I have always wanted to own music. With the switch from vinyl to CD, I felt a little bit cheated that the old format was obsolete but I ploughed on anyway. The final straw was when my old car died and I was left with a bunch of cassettes that I could no longer play.

My friends tell me I could transfer all those old songs to some new-fangled format. If they were proper friends they would know why that is not gonna happen. Other friends tell me I could I buy them again in some other proprietary format but that was probably before they read the previous paragaph.

As of today, I no longer want to own music. I am going to rent it.

I just bought a Sansa Rhapsody and from henceforth, I will listen to all the music in the world for $15/month.

The only problem I have now is what to do with all those CDs and LPs cluttering up my living room. Perhaps I will keep them as a reminder of how we used to own music back in the 20th century.

The Constructionists tell us that children learn best when we let them form their own theories about the world by making things. In contrast, the Instructionists tell us that children learn better when we-who-know tell them what the theories are.

I was always attracted by the idea of constructionism, but have not done a great job of implementing it in my parenting. Enter Jazz’s piano teacher.

Teacher : OK, Jazz, I wanted you play this song

Jazz (playing everything except that song) : tinkle tinkle. bong bong bong

Teacher : Oh that’s pretty, Jazz. How would it sound if you tinkle-bonged like this…

Jazz : tinkle bong bong bong. tinkle bong bong bong

Teacher : Very nice Jazz. Let’s write down your song. This is a stave, and you played a G, then an A and…

I was horrified at first. I found myself glancing at the clock and wondering how much I was paying to hear Jazz tinkle-bong around the keyboard with seemingly no structure to the lessons at all. Georgina couldn’t take it at all - she had to leave the room.

[epilogue]

It’s about three months since I started this post and Jazz is doing really well. She is probably at about the same point in her study as she would have been if she had taken a more direct - instructionist - route except that she still loves playing the piano and she loves to compose.

It’s so easy, as a parent or a teacher, to fall into instructionist ways. It takes real discipline to stick with the less-disciplined constructionist approach. I hope I can do it and, if I do, I will be forever grateful to Jazz’s piano teacher for showing me the way.

I did it. I filled the gaping whole in my life and replaced my B52s album.

I have listened to that album several thousand times over the years and I could never figure out what that second song was all about. It’s gratifying to find out that it was utter nonsense all along. It’s just a bunch of random girls names. The chorus is just “names. names. names.” or something.

I am still not smart enough to embed videos. When I tried, it completely trashed my website. Wordpress doesn’t seem to like the object tag. You’ll have to go all the way to YouTube to watch the B52s on SNL.

The B52s were the Salvador Dalis of post-punk. Ever wonder what it was that fell in the deep to be mistaken for a rock lobster? It was an ear lobe.

Speaking of Salvador Dali… How many surrealists does it take to replace a light bulb? Eight. One to hold the giraffe and seven to fill the bathtub with brightly coloured machine tools.

I wish I could figure out that newfangled way of embedding YouTube videos in my blog. Then I could embed this one - Battle of the Bands.

That reminds me. I caught Dylan singing Rock Lobster yesterday. Doing that jerky-punch-everyone-around-you dance is my fondest memory from Jacko’s 21st birthday party (what was that dance called?) where I first heard the B52s. My second favourite memory is the delicious selection of Yop-based cocktails that I invented that night - the most memorable of which was named Sunset over Lichtenstein - but for some reason I don’t remember anything after the cocktails.

Anyway. I was devastated when I realized that I had thrown out my copy of The B52s when I got rid of the convertible since it had the last cassette player I was likely to own. I only had a few cassettes but they will definitely all need replacing. I am ashamed to say that I no longer own Bat Out of Hell, Janis Joplin’s Greatest Hits or anything by Simon and Garfunkel. Maybe someone who loves me will read this and buy me one for Christmas.

Oh. And while I am on the topic. How come every American my age knows all the words to The Love Shack but none of them have heard of Planet Clare or 6060842? What’s up with that?

And if you hear vague traces of skipping reels of rhyme,
To your tambourine in time.
It's just a ragged clown behind,
I wouldn't pay it any mind,
It's just a shadow you're seeing that he's chasing.