Old cars
Do you remember the days of Truman, Stalin and de Gaulle ? If so, can you tell me the make and year of the cool car in this picture ?
Pop Music
- What are the undocumented lyrics just before the bridge in the Association’s “Along Comes Mary” ? (Sounds like ‘I walked a mile, talked a while’.)
- And what is that Carmen chick babbling in Spanish behind Eric Burdon’s monologue in “Spill The Wine” ? (Eric’s part is well settled, and isn’t what I’m asking about.)
- Why doesn’t Clear Channel’s ‘banned post-9/11’ list include Quicksilver Messenger Service’s “Pride of Man” for its lines, And it shall cause your tower to fall / Make of you a pyre of flame ? (about 2:48 into the track) Hm, I guess they weren’t playing old-hippie music any more anyway.
- Were Daryl Hall and John Oates a pair romantically as well as musically ? If yes, why couldn’t they, y’know, admit it ? People were whispering it anyway.
- What’s the title of that salsa tune where the guy sings
Pero ¡ay! Qué barbaridad
Y yo sin moverme del mismo lugar.
Answered! “La Rueda” by Frankie Ruíz - What are the exact notes in that big piano intro to “I Will Survive” ? And the manic little gtr fill at second repetition of “… jumped out on the road” in Van Halen’s Runnin’ With the Devil? (Yes, I could tape them and waste an hour working it out, but someone must have done it already…)
What were they thinking? (aka: selling it)
Every pitchman knows you get better message retention if you arouse the customer, but did Gatorade — whose target customers are about as homophobic as they [ahem] come — have to make ’em squirm by asking “Is it in you?” (And in a similar vein: “Make [take?] Seven-up yours”.)
Also apparently unclear on the difference between ‘arouse’ and ‘annoy’:
- Radio ad for a well-known brand of choc. chip cookies, sung out of tune by kids. And this spot was in heavy rotation on a weekend oldies show, meaning it was aimed at a group that gets its own age-segregated housing just so they don’t have to listen to other people’s irritating kids!
- Many ads, for every fool thing under the sun, featuring the sound of a ringing office phone. Yeh, nothing like prefixing your pitch with the universal warning signal for “Here comes an unwanted interruption that’s going to make your life more complicated.”
- And what is up with slicing out every millisecond of space between spoken phrases? Somebody must have told these jokers that listeners’ minds wander when exposed to normal-speed speech. What they didn’t mention was that our brains give up entirely when information doesn’t arrive in logical, manageable chunks.
Too clever for its own good: carpet store telling us to phone them at “one ton of carpet”. It wasn’t until I’d had four takes that I understood that’s what they were saying — and anyone who did understand would have to figure out also that “1” is the numeral 1, so ‘one ton of carpet’ = 1 (866) 632-2773. Tough luck if you didn’t follow that, b/c all the mental exertion probably wiped out your memory of the dealer’s name, too.
Canned radio-station announcements, “Back to music in two minutes” (or other words to same effect): OK, first of all, “bumpers” are pure evil to begin with — they disrupt the flow of the music, they steal a whole song’s worth of time every two hours or so, and they offer no offsetting benefit whatever for the listener. But then to taunt me with a promise not to air anything I can use? Think I’m not going to reach straight for the button that knocks your McStation off my stereo?
WWW
- If Micros—t prevailed in the OS and browser wars, then why is it that almost every browser screen capture I see shows Netscape Navigator (or its cousins Firefox or Safari) and usually it’s running on MacOS ? (Maybe among people who do real creative work for the Web, the smart money’s still on Apple and Mozilla?)
- Why does Netscape Nav QUIT when I double-click (by accident, of course) on the vertical scrollbar ? Or sometimes, it reloads the page instead. Seems to be a dice roll.
- If Y2K has been and gone, why do I still run into Web sites that use a whole page of intricate JS and then end up telling me the date is something like September 16, 102 ? Not only are these designers too clueless to code 1980+(yr+20)%100 , they’re also too lazy to check their page in a standards-compliant browser and notice there’s even a problem.
- On my web guy page, why does "class=san" apply the font change if I put it in the <H1> tag, but not if it’s in the <DIV> tag a couple levels out ? Is this a Netscape “feature” that intentionally blocks style inheritance by a TD ?
- In MSIE’s cookies folder, is there a way to view the cookies in a big heap, not individually ? Where does M$ document the format of that index.dat file ?
Misc. musings
- Ever notice that if you render the word “Arial” in the font Arial, it comes out looking like “Anal” ??
- Why isn’t there a watering hole in Silicon Valley called the Pewter Room ? [maybe ’cos no one is left there who’s English-fluent enough to ‘get’ the joke]
- What did crazy people wrap their heads in, before plastic bags were invented ?
- Why do the locals in Paso Robles [Calif.] say their town’s name with the vowels of ‘a..hole nobles’ ??
- Why doesn’t “baked” rhyme with “naked” ?
- Couldn’t the “roach coach” (lunch truck) for my neighborhood have picked a more reassuring tune for its musical horns than La Cucaracha ?
Please send your cosmic insights to 
(Answers to these and
other questions will be posted when found)