In the final chapter of Soul Music one of Susan’s school friends mentions there’s a new guy a the chip shop and adds “Swear he’s Elvish.”
I read that bit and immediately thought, “Kirsty MacColl reference!”
…:smack:
Up until then I thought when characters kept asking Imp if he was Elvish, they were simply saying he had a slightly non-human appearance.
Hmm, in Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s novel Good Omens, there’s a scene where one of the characters sees someone who is clearly supposed to be Elvis working in a fast food restaurant called a Burger Lord in Des Moines, Iowa. Does this also relate to the Kirsty MacColl song? Or is that just a general reference to the “Elvis is still alive” rumors?:
Then there’s Weird Al’s song, One More Minute. I listened to it for years before I twigged to the full meaning of the line “You’ve got me feeling down in the dumps 'cause I’m stranded all alone at the gas station of love and I have to use the self service pumps.”
Well, Good Omens was published in May 1990 and the song charted in 1981. So it’s possible. But the song was part of a wash of Elvis rumors, so not necessarily.
Elvis also appeared in a diner in Mostly Harmless, on 1992. (Fifth HHGG book.)
Probably not. “Elvis is alive and working in a diner,” is a specific trope associated with Weekly World News, Fortean Times, and similar “news” papers. In Good Omens, Adam, the young anti-Christ is obsessed with these sorts of stories, and thinks they’re true. Gaiman and Pratchett undoubtedly were aware of this trope independently of the McColl song, just from the knowledge they display of the other tropes associated with those periodicals. The Soul Music version of the trope, though, is directly echoing McColl’s song lyric: which makes sense, as Soul Music was basically an exercise by Pratchett to see how many music-related puns he could cram into a single novel.
Now, here’s something I hadn’t really considered until I wrote this post: during the course of Good Omens, as Adam’s powers grow, he starts altering reality around him to match his understanding of the world - which includes a belief in things like the Loch Ness Monster and alien abductions, which he read about in the collection of conspiracy mags and woo-woo science he got from Anathema Device. Almost certainly included in those magazines were stories about Elvis being alive, and working in a greasy spoon.
So, did Adam unconsciously resurrect Elvis as one of the earliest manifestations of his powers?
Not a pun but: I was watching Major League for the umpteenth time, it finally occurred to me, they never play a road game!
This came up on Mythbusters, and it never occurred to me before. The old trope of a car crashing through a pane of glass carried by two workmen is because the glass is clear, and the driver didn’t see it! He just thought he was navigating between two pedestrians.
I had always assumed that the workmen could have been carrying anything, and the driver just didn’t have time to avoid them, and they chose glass because it looked more impressive shattering than, say, a bookcase or sofa table.
This was pointed out on Facebook recently…
The waitress on the cover of Supertramp’s “Breakfast In America” album stands there like a famous statue…
Really? That seemed completely obvious to me the first time I saw the album cover.
I know, pathetic, right? But I did get Jackson Browne’s “Redneck Friend” on my own, so I got that going for me…
Have you forgotten the title of this thread? 
I’ve never owned the Breakfast in America album, and I never really looked at the cover consciously, but of course I’ve seen it in passing a million times. So I never noticed until someone mentioned it that the NYC cityscape behind the waitress is made up of restaurant items.
I have to admit that Little Richard’s songs went over my head until I was an adult and I used to listen to an oldies station when I was working my second job late at night:
**Keep On Knockin’ **
Keep a knockin’ but you can’t come in
Keep a knockin’ but you can’t come in
Keep a knockin’ but you can’t come in
Come back tomorrow night and try it again
Long Tall Sally
Well, long tall Sally, she’s built for speed
She got everything that Uncle John needs
I also didn’t “get” the drug references in the 1970s live action series **H.R. Puffingstuff **and Lidsville.
Finally, I missed a lot of the Christian allegories in the Narnia series until I was in my late teens. I enjoyed the stories and completely missed the biblical references
It also describes his gambling habit.
The Godfather’s name was Vito Andolini until he went to Ellis Island. He was from Corleone.They changed his last name there to Corleone.
Excuse me, but did you read my post carefully? Yes, I know that he’s from Corleone. I’ve read the book and seen the movie. I know that the people at Ellis Island misunderstood when they looked at the information he was carrying with him (a badge around his neck, if I recall correctly). They saw the word “Corleone” on the badge and thought that that was his last name, although actually it was the town he came from. I was replying to Hermione two posts before mine. She said that Puzo may have chosen that name for Don Corleone because of the translation “lion heart.” My point was that Corleone just happens to be a real town in Sicily where a lot of Mafia members came from. It’s not necessarily true then that Puzo meant the pun on “lion heart.”
If it helps, as far as I know the creators still insist there weren’t drug references in either.
Puffingstuff could easily be pot. Tobacco as well, I guess, but it sounds more like a pot thing. As for Lidsville, a “lid” in some quarters was slang for a half an ounce of pot.
Well, yes. And the shows themselves are nonstop psychedelic mayhem. I’m just saying that Sid and Marty Krofft still publicly insist they didn’t do drugs and didn’t make drug references in their shows.
Diagon Alley exists at a diagonal to the muggle world.