Knowing that phrase comes from Kubla Khan actually makes me feel better about it. It still sounds dorky, but at least there’s a reason for him choosing it that specific phrase.
I like the newer version with “that *famous *book by Nabokov”. It flows better.
Aside, his second-famousest book is about butterflies.
Wouldn’t you love to see them live and compare them?
We still use the phrase “drop a dime,” but it doesn’t mean simply “to make a phone call” but rather to snitch on someone. I didn’t realize that it used to be used in a literal sense.
There’s also the phrase “who put a nickel in you” which I still (rarely) hear, even though nickel-operated toys/machines haven’t been around since…well, I don’t remember them in my lifetime.
Because Bangkok has a reputation as a sinful city:
*One night in Bangkok and the world’s your oyster
The bars are temples but the pearls ain’t free
You’ll find a god in every golden cloister
A little flesh, a little history
I can feel an angel sliding up to me
*
The “angel” in this case being either a female hooker or a ladyboy, I would imagine.
I do. Songs on a jukebox used to be a nickel, at least until sometime in the mid-to-late '60s. Long before that, there were nickelodeons.
What the heck has the SDMB come to, that nobody’s yet mentioned Neil Diamond by way of Dave Barry?
“I AM,” I said – to no one there – and no one heard at all; not even the chair.
I was going to use The cattle all have brucellosis as an oddly chosen line, but it’s Warren Zevon, so it’s not.
If Zevon were allowed, this thread would be nothing but.
Not any one word, but the black absurdity: “Roland raised his Thompson gun, didn’t say a word…”
which does follow to a rhyme with Johannesburg, but we’ve already crossed Zevo off the list.
Steve Miller’s Take the Money and Run:
“Billy Mack is a detective down in Texas
You know he knows just exactly what the facts is.”
Misquote. Miller is describing a South’ren law officer who is not too dumb to understand (then-)modern technology:
"You know he knows just exactly where the fax is."
I thought it was some kind of take off from Joe Friday’s “Just the facts, please.”
The line that always bothers me is in Magic by the Cars:
*High shoes with the cleats a-clickin’ *
Um, what kind of footwear is she wearing? I always picture platform baseball cleats.
Same question: “pompatus” ?
Almost certainly.
He’s describing a pretty wild gal in the punk/post-disco era. High heels or platforms with tap cleats or hobnails doesn’t strike me as being at all odd in that context.
It means “pompous idiot who wants everyone to just shut up and listen to his rantings.” In Finnish.
The Master Speaks in an old column: In Steve Miller’s “The Joker,” what is “the pompatus of love”? - The Straight Dope
More than that, it was a metaphor for US–Soviet relations.
I wonder how many people here remember the chess tournament between Boris Spassky and Bobby Fisher in Reykjavik during the summer of 1972? I was at Russian language camp then, and another student (a chess champion in his home state) got daily updates in the mail from his mother. In the age of détente, it was a big deal!
For some reason (it being neutral ground, I guess), the first meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev was also held in Reykjavik, though this was long after Chess debuted, IIRC.
The otherwise brilliant Warren Zevon had a few clinkers, the worst in Mr. Bad Example
I put my last few francs down on a prostitute
Who took me up to her room to perform the flag salute
Whereupon I stole her passport and her wig
And headed for the airport and the midnight flight, you dig?
You dig? YOU DIG?!
Thomas Dolby has created some strange lyrics, as well.
This is from *Leipzig *off of his Golden Age of Wireless album:
Faces smile down from a hoarding?
Evocative, strange and virtually incomprehensible.