The King is gone, and so’s my Missus,
This is the story of Sidney Vicious
“As God has shown us by turning stones to bread…” from We Are The World.
Um, no. Jesus (to whom they are obviously referring) refused to turn stones to bread.
My my at Waterloo Napoleon did surrender.
No he didn’t
Galveston Flood (about the 1900 hurricane, with Tom Rush recording possibly the best known version), has a part that goes:
Galveston built a seawall just to keep the water down
But a high tide from the ocean blew the water all over the town
Galveston didn’t build the seawall until after that hurricane.
I dunno. Didn’t January 1963, February 1963 and part of March 1963, all well before JFK’s assassination, more properly count as being part of the “winter of 1963”?
What makes you think that an English group would be singing about a town in the northern United States, or that their reference point for Beatlemania would be the American outbreak in winter 1964?
The unofficial state song, “Almost Heaven West Virginia” has a couple boo-boos in it. First, none of the Blue Ridge mountains run thru WV, and only a weensy bit of the Shenendoah River flows thru the state. Despite that, it’s still a nice song.
But as Wikipedia notes, they still managed to fuck up the actual place they were singing about, Tanworth in Arden, which is neither a town, nor northern.
I know we’ve debated this to death, but I still say the correct expression is “You’ve got another think coming”(*) regardless of what Judas Priest has to say about it.
(*) For anyone who missed the previous threads on this, it’s a deliberately ungrammatical way of saying “think again”.
Can we have poems?
From Philip Larkin’s Annus Mirabilis:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP
According to my records (Wiki) the Beatles’ first album Please Please Me was released on 22 March 1963. The writer is therefore trying to tell us that sexual intercourse began between 1 January and 22 March 1963.
I haven’t got a cite but I’m pretty sure that sexual intercourse began a lot earlier than Larkin would have us believe.
The Doors song Five To One opens with:
Five to one, baby, one in five
Uh, Jim? Five to one equals one in six.
I used MapQuest to try to find 16 Parkside Lane (Taxi) in San Francisco. Didn’t find it.
Charlemagne’s knight Roland was killed in Spain by Basques. In high-school we read the Twelfth-Century (period of the Crusades) poem “The Song of Roland,” which changes the Basques to “Saracens.”
Harry Chapin, in his epic “30,000 Pounds of Bananas” claims that folks in Scranton ate about 30,000 pounds of bananas “each day”. That seems a bit high to me. So…
The song came out in 1974.
Wiki gives several population estimates for Scranton, but none for 1974. The 1950 estimate is 125,536, and the 1990 estimate is 81,805. Assuming the population decline was more or less linear, that gives a 1974 population of around 99,297.
According to the USDA (via Google answers), the average per capita consumption of bananas in the US in 1976 (the oldest year for which I find data) was 19.3 pounds/year. I’ll use that figure for 1974. Close enough.
So, 99297 Scrantonians X 19.3 lbs/Scrantonian/year X year/365 days gives us an estimate of only about 5250 pounds/day for the city. We’ll bump it up a bit, assuming that Harry is including the whole Scranton MSA. Still, 30,000 pounds a day? Pfft! I think not! Oh, Harry, how you let me down!
You’re probably one of those guys who calls 867-5309 and asks for Jenny, aren’t you?
The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down - The Band
By May the 10th, Richmond had fell
(Well yeah, by May 10th Richmond sure had “fell.” Because it fell back on April 3.)
Back with my wife in Tennessee
when one day she said to me
“Virgil quick come see
There goes Robert E. Lee”
Lee never fought in Tennessee, and likely never visited the place after the war.
Nope, never have.
This isn’t historical or factual, but grammatical. In D.I.'s Richard Hung Himself the last line (as sung) is ‘Your answer is non-seglitur’. Drives me nuts.
I like the way Joan Baez kind of stutters it out as “the Robert E. Lee”, which was a steamboat, and did in fact travel the waters of Tennessee.
Sorry Duke of Earl,there is no dukedom
Yes, I’ve always thought the expression “winter of XXXX” referred to the winter at the beginning of XXXX, as January & February are typically the most “wintry” months of the year (obviously this is from a northern-hemisphere POV).