I'll never ever learn

Never seen Wiktionary before.

I should look things up before I type anything anywhere. Lord knows I've told myself this often enough, but of course I never will. The older I get, the more I realize just how full of crap my schoolteachers were. Another childhood certainty vanquished this afternoon. And precisely one moment too late.

We were always taught that there were never Kings of Scotland, only Kings of Scots: they ruled the people, never the land itself. Thus the origin of the Moot Hill at Scone, where the ancient kings were crowned. A noble would swear his allegiance to the new monarch standing on a mound of his own earth.

Turns out they've been claiming the country as there own since before the Union of Crowns! The bastards.

I'll get me coat, as they used to say on television.

Strut, Stride, Sing

There's this record, right - don't know what it is called, don't know the name of the band - but its been playing on KROQ for a couple months, which makes it new by their standards (they don't play many new records on "The World Famous KROQtm", but when they do, they play them to death forever.)

Anyway: the song. That song. Don't know what it is called, don't know the name of the band. Were it up to me, the band would be called Princess!!!, and its lead singer Freddie Quicksilver or somesuch. I'd tell their lead guitarist - Brian September - that the thing he knows is missing from his sound but can't-quite-put-his-finger-on is called a tanner, a sixpence, and that he needs to find one and use instead of a plastic pick. A dime would do, I suppose, but a tanner would be more authentic.

Does that help?

Thing is, this nameless driveled creepcringe song, I hate it; but like home-alone teenage boobies to the scratchings of a midnight basement, I find myself horribly, irresistably, drawn to it:

Hello?... Is anyone down there?...

Don't know what it's called, but I've never heard a song that so desperately needed to be a 70's Rock Anthem. No-bodee will take meee ali-iiiiive or maybe a theme for children's adventure cartoon, like "Marine Boy" or "Fascist Avengers" You and I must fight for our ri-iiiiights or no - not cartoon, but THIS!:

The Flashing Blade.

I'm thinking it's a dim shade of a theme long past - You've got to fight for what you want! - that has been caught and clasped in a bawdy new bunnet, then hurled oot the radio towards the unsuspecting Old Folks?

But why?

Has the clock expired on that particular void in the pososphere? Is it that time again, already?

I don't think I want to know.

TOO LATE: the band is Muse. The song is "Knights of Cydonia".

Could be a pisstake - I just don't know.

"I know it was you..."

That one little "this Pres"...

"I know it was you, Fredo."

What an apt metaphor for The Deciderer - poor Fredo Corleone, bewilderingly out of his depth.

[HT: Sullivan]