SIDE A
Slow-motion Suicide Amnesty Protecting Alaska's Wildlife Jeffersonian Ideals The Cybernetic Genome Project A Short History of the Word Ammonia
SIDE B
(Eating a Potato is Like) Eating Dirt Mr. Flint Breckinridge In America the 'H' is Silent Eth-this, Eth-that Graphite Poisoning Vanilla
Slow-motion Suicide
(Sung to the tune of Rossini's "William Tell Overture"--the Lone
Ranger part)
Starvation is one way to die
But I cannot resist lightly salted potato chips.
Slow poisons are redundant
After all, look at this world, look at this world, look at this world.
Starvation is one way to die
But how mesmerizing it is to have a refrigerator humming on the cold tile floor.
Engaging the services of a hired gun would be fearsome dramatic.
Who wants fearsome dramatic apart from tv, tv, tv.
Starvation is one way to die
But habits are stubborn routines, it wouldn't be as easy as it feels that I
need.
Living life recklessly bores me
I'm no Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean, sweet Jimmy Dean.
Going on living is one way
to die.
Going on living is slow-motion suicide.
Amnesty
(Sung to the tune of "Born
Free")
I am applying for amnesty
An incredible opportunity I'm told
A chance at bureaucratically processed and state sanctioned immunity
Erasing what stigma, erasing what risk my absurd situation brings
Like the wind blows, like the birds yank worms from the mud.
Of course, it is clearly
explained,
Applying for amnesty implies some sort of confession
Which is to say that nobody will perceive me to be worthy of this chance to be
free
Paranoia is the price for my playing the lottery
Like the warmth of the sun on an old woman's upturned face, like a child's song.
If amnesty, once sought, is
denied
Then the options are drastically narrowed
Deportation can be a fun upheaval from what I understand
Or there is always indefinite detention in a cell of the county jail
The food there has maggots, they say
Like the smell of the ocean, like the silent gliding dance of the clouds.
Protecting
Alaska's Wildlife
(Sung to the Tune of Little Richard's
"Tutti Frutti")
Pristine
SPLAT
Once pristine
(repeat till music ends)
Jeffersonian
Ideals
(Sung to the Tune of "Amazing
Grace")
So nice to be fornicating
today
It makes me drunk and sleepy
It makes me catch myself humming unawares
O la-la-la!
My wench is a beautiful
woman
I wonder if she'll live to grow old and grey
In a way, that would be a pity
O la-la-la!
How she pleases me with the
simplest touch
Her warmth and subtlety
She recalls to me other equally fabulous dames
O la-la-la!
Someday John Adams will live
to regret what he did to me
That genius bastard.
Better take a bath and powder my wig, dig into destiny.
O la-la-la! O la-la-la!
The
Cybernetic Genome Project
(Sung to the Tune of "Theme from
The Beverly Hillbillies")
Miniature robotics meshed
with organic goo
Are quite the Creator's palette
Nobody knows quite where it will lead
Nobody seriously imagines the potential grief except for Hollywood
I wish that Bollywood would catch on. Hooray for Bollywood!
Gyrating dancers with dots
on their heads
Warbling voices sing jaunty flirtations
And dusky men with brilliant teeth spin the girls around
The music is canned.
Which is the human, which
the machine
Where does one draw the line
Is hybridization an evil love affair
What about crossbreeding
Oh well. Who cares.
The woman will look deep
into his soul
His whole soul
His hole of a soul
And she will cast her eyes
down, toss head to the right,
Toss head to the left
Crescendo, colorful scarves a-whirl
Mechanisms purr, like a cat whose purr can only be felt not heard.
Mrowww!
(spoken:)
"Ya'll come back now, y' hear!"
A
Short History of the Word Ammonia
(Sung to the Tune of Helen Reddy's
"I am Woman")
According to lexicographers
Ammonia gets its name from a desert place by the name of Ammon
Deep in the Saudi sands.
Ammon, in days long long past, was a well-known stop for weary travelers
Whose camels--being, after all, biological creatures with their own physical
limitations--Needed to empty their bladders.
The camel urine was
collected there in Ammon's wonderful camel urine cess pools.
It had a certain, notorious odor.
In time, and with the
intervention of clever technology,
The collected camel urine was processed into crystals.
These Ammon Salts were famous universally, almost universally.
The salts, of course, could
be transported--somewhat ironically,
If one goes in for that sort of thing, that is,
If one indulges in delicious but trivial ironic observations--
Transported by camel caravans, along with so many other vital goods.
Easier to carry the camel's pee as bags of salt than in liquid form, to be sure.
For both man and beast! Wo, yeah…
Ammon salts, then, in turn
were reconstituted into a liquid
And voila, presto, habakaching! We have ammonia.
Have you ever been tricked
(perhaps as a child) into smelling ammonia
(Taking a big deep brain-searing whiff, I mean)?
Have you breathed ammonia?
Have you smelled the camel's pee?
SIDE
B
(Eating
a Potato is Like) Eating Dirt
(Sung to the Tune of "(You Make
Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman")
If you get on your knees to
uproot a potato your knees come away with dirt.
When you detach it from its stem and hold it in your hand it is a heavy thing of
dirt.
When you rub its leathery skin with your thumb you're rubbing dirt.
Wash it
Scrub it
Peel it
Boil it and you're boiling dirt.
Eat the dirt. With ketchup
it still is dirt.
Eating a potato is like
eating dirt.
Eating a potato is like eating dirt.
Oh, eating a potato is, eating a potato is like eating dirt.
Mr.
Flint Breckinridge
(Sung to the Tune of "Old
MacDonald Had a Farm")
The governor appointed Mr.
Flint Breckinridge to sit at his pleasure
On the State Board of Pardon and Paroles.
Mr. Flint Breckinridge
agreed, and dutifully he traveled
from the city where he ran his family-owned-and-operated business, business
To each month's meeting of the Pardon and Parole Board,
Which rotated among the various state prisons for reasons of logistics and
tradition,
oh, yeah.
Mr. Flint Breckinridge
always arrived last, never less than twenty minutes late.
He always voted the same: if the case were one of Pardon or clemency
(As in the cases of death row inmates seeking mercy from the lethal injection)
He would listen, shift in his seat, keep his head down while slowly becoming
clammy,
Yes, slowly becoming clammy, clammy,
And he would vote "No."
If the case were one of
Parole
(As in the majority of the cases which came before the Board)
He would listen, shift in his seat, keep his head down while slowly becoming
clammy,
Yes, slowly becoming clammy, clammy,
And he would vote "No."
One month he came an hour
after the meeting had convened, yeah,
And it was too late, too late for him to participate.
So that month, Mr. Flint Breckinridge never took off his coat
He just nodded a silent apology, then went back home.
One day, the governor told
Mr. Flint Breckinridge he was fired
For not showing enough subtlety.
Yes, the governor loved subtlety, subtlety.
Mr. Flint Breckinridge told a reporter who called to inquire that he had
resigned.
He had reluctantly left the State Board of Pardon and Paroles, he said,
soas not to neglect his family-operated business, owned-and-operated business.
When asked about this in
turn, the governor's spokesman laughed and said, "Oh, okay."
The spokesman said "Okay."
The spokesman said "Okay!"
In
America, The H is Silent
(Sung to the Tune of Jethro Tull's
"Aqualung")
In the American dialect of
English,
In contrast to the British dialect of same,
The h in herb is silent unless you're talking 'bout a man,
Like Herb Albert.
So, when the dude from
London sat in my kitchen and asked for some Herbal Tea,
It kind of bothered me. It disturbed my American sensibilities.
'Erbal, please, not Herbal. I'll serve you 'erbal tea 'cause, man…
In America, the H is silent,
man
In America, the H is silent.
In America…
I don't put Herb Albert in
my salad dressing
I don't grow Herb Albert in my back yard
I don't sprinkle Herb Albert on any of my cuisine
So crimey, God Save the Queen, if you must
And celebrate Boxing Day
But when you're sitting in my kitchen in the USA just keep in mind:
In America, the H is silent,
man
In America, the H is silent.
In America…
In America, the H is silent, man, man, man, man, man…
(fade)
Eth-this,
Eth-that
(Sung to the Tune of "I Got a Gal
in Kalamazoo")
Ethology, they say, has to
do with socio-biology, yeah,
Something to do with anthropology, too
Ethnography, by the way, is all about social science imposing labels on physical
traits, Yeah, like the color of skin,
Yeah, like the color of skin and eyes and hair and on and on
They put it in rather snooty terms if you ask me: "primitive
societies"
They're laying a construct of abstract definitions on those "primitive
societies"
Etymology, hey-hey,
etymology does NOT have to do with bugs,
No, nothing to do with bugs.
See, it's entomology that relates to insects,
Are you a fan of bugs? Of crawly little vermin?
If so, oh, oh, oh…
Stick to entomology
Steer clear of etymology, the story of words
Words like ethology, ontology, entimiddleocracy,
Yeah,
Yeah,
It's the story of nothing but words…blah blah blah
Et means "and" in
etcetera, so what does "cetera" mean?
If you don't know (You don't know!)
And you don't wanna know (Don't wanna know!)
Then maybe you should crawl on with the bugs
Back to some primitive society where
Ain't no etymology around.
Stick to entomology
Steer clear of etymology, the story of words
Like ethology, ontology, entimiddleocracy,
Yeah,
Yeah,
It's the story of nothing but words…blah blah blah
Graphite
Poisoning
(Sung to the Tune of "The
Candyman Can")
I was chewing on my pencil,
yeah, all of us were doing it
We all of us were chewing and rolling our pencils with our lollygaggin tongues
They were painted yellow
And they had pink erasers
And they all of them were pencils number 2--wooo, ooo, ooo…
Everyone in class chewed
their pencils, pencils, I was not the only one
But I was the only one who wasn't afraid to raise my hand and ask
"Hey Missus Webber, is pencil lead poison, so am I going to die?"
Missus Webber was a mean ol
broad
And everybody gasped when they heard what I asked
But I wasn't afraid, no, I wasn't afraid 'cause I followed all the rules
I had raised my hand real nice and let her call on me..
"You cain't git lead
poisonin," she said, "from no pencil lead, fool."
And before I could say "How come" she tried to explain,
"Graphite, fool, that's what's in your pencil lead, ain't lead,
Mmmm, no, ain't no real lead in you pencil lead a-tall."
Well holy crap, everyone was
now deathly afraid, truly and deeply and rightly afraid
Of graphite poisoning
We looked graphite up in the dictionary and there it was all right, really a
word,
Something to do with pencils
Graphite poisoning
Got graphite poisoning
We all got graphite poisoning
Gonna die, gonna die now
Graphite poisoning --a long
slow death
Starts in the fifth grade when you take a bite from that tree-of-knowledge fruit
And chew, chew, chew…chewin' on your pencils….yeah…
Gonna die, gonna die now
Vanilla
(Sung to the Tune of "The Star
Spangled Banner")
There's vanilla what grows
as beans
And there's vanilla extract what comes in a bottle
And there's vanilla what's infusing itself throughout a pint of ice cream
There's vanilla what sits
smack in between chocolate and strawberry and loses itself
There's vanilla what is often overlooked just 'cause it ain't fancy
And there's the fancy kind, what calls itself French vanilla
I love vanilla
Better than I love singing about it
I love vanilla
More than what vanilla loves me
I don't care what that it's
artificial flavored
They call that vanillin
Kind of funny, but hey, it taste the same to me
And it's cheaper
So what the hey
I love vanilla
Better than I love singing about it
I love vanilla
More than what vanilla loves me
Yeah, vanilla loves me,
Yeah, vanilla loves me.