I’ve always thought that line should be “Oh yes, today came suddenly.” In fact, I have been known to argue that that is the line. Haven’t gotten around to asking Sir Paul about it, though. 
Agreed. It’s almost a logical paradox worthy of inclusion in Douglas Hofstader’s book Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.
Actually, it’s not subject to a vote. …less lucky than I is the correct form.
Actually, even though I like the Moody Blues, I must say that I find Graeme Edge’s “poetry” to be, more often than not, unintentionally hilarious, this being just one isolated example of why.
I dunno. He could have written it before his birthday, and added the other verse afterwards.
I’m a bit surprised no one has yet mentioned Jason Mraz’s line in “I’m Yours”:
“It’s our God-forsaken right to be loved, loved, loved…”
Uh, Jason… was this a misguided attempt to be clever, or just ignorance?
This is a minor one, but – Eric Burdon was apparently under the misapprehension that “San Franciscan Nights” are warm.
Warm is subjective. Compared to here, the nights there are warm.
Brilliant! Absolutely -ing brilliant!
I hadn’t heard that before - thanks Aspidistra.
I think that’s a whoosh. After all, what does god damned mean, literally? But you wouldn’t object to “It’s our god-damned right . . .” would you? I have no idea who this Mraz person is, but I hear that as a play on god-given.
Christmas does end after New Years, though- Epiphany is January 6.
Not all Jews keep kosher, in fact I’m pretty sure that the majority of North American Jews do not, and thus, a Jew eating bacon is not really that far-fetched.
It is, but I is not correct in Melissa Etheridge’s Yes I Am.
Poetic license is all well and good but every time I hear this, I cringe. It’s such a powerful song, then you get that clunker. Ouch.
That’s an oxymoron. The British are linguistic imperialists, and have for centuries imposed their own pronunciations on foreign words. Byron rhymed Don Juan with Ewan; Manuel and manual are indistinguishable; I have heard British literary personages pronounce Don Quixote as Don KWIK-soat.
So just pointing out that such mispronunciations are something of a proud tradition doesn’t mean they’re correct; just that they don’t give a shit.
I think it’s far more likely that he was equivocating than that his sexuality has changed.
You might want to re-read that.
The mirror says “Objects in mirror are closer than they appear”.
Pure lyrical genius! There’s no error there.
They just don’t write songs like this anymore.
I always assumed that was a British pronunciation (Procol Harum was a British group).
I always thought that was the point…that the sun never went down. I never really got how far north the northern town was, but that was the imagery I had in my head when I first heard that song.
I just put this into a separate post because I picked the whole song apart.
Being from New Orleans, I always wondered the same thing. But then again, the Everglades is only about a 10-12 hour drive from here, so maybe they drove all night to get there. But then again, afterwards they stood there listening to bayou rain. Most of the time when anything is referred to as “Bayou” anything, it’s got something to do with southern Louisiana.
Furthermore: “The county sheriff had a hare-lip, Louisiana’s pride and joy”
There are no counties in Louisiana. I won’t even go into why it was necessary to mention that the (parish) sheriff had a hare-lip. Didn’t doctors figure out how to cosmetically fix that back in the 1940s?
The sheriff will “accept a contribution to the Opelousas Charity Ball”. First they were in New Orleans, then Florida, now Opelousas, which is in western (more like south central, but there’s not much west of there) Louisiana, around 150 miles west of New Orleans. They were all over the place.
The (parish) sheriff then suggests that they “drive this dirty Datsun into the Gulf of Mexico”. Opelousas is about 40 miles north of Lafayette. Not really all that close to the Gulf.
“Typhoon Pierre delayed my plane till morning”. We don’t have typhoons in Louisiana.
I guess that’s it.
Yeah, that’s the whole point. Meatloaf got it backwards with the lyric.
The thread is about song lyrics with errors, and that one is like fingernails on the blackboard, OK?
I’ve heard all kinds of people refer to a foolish or hopeless venture as “kwikZOTTic.” Argh. And I don’t care who says it’s correct- Argh again, say I.
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No. A half-life is how long it takes for half of a radioactive isotope to decay.
So if the half-life is 10,000 years, after 10,000 years half the substance has decayed, and only half is left.
The amount of radiation an isotope produces depends on the amount of the isotope and the half-life. If you have twice as much material, it puts out twice as much radiation. And the shorter the half-life, the more radiation it produces, because the isotope produces radiation when it decays into other isotopes.
So for instance, Uranium-238 has a half-life of 4 billion years. That means if you have a kilogram of U-238, after 4 billion years you’d only have half a kilogram left. So U-238 isn’t very radioactive and isn’t very dangerous. U-235 has a half-life of 700 million years, so it’s almost 10 times as radioactive, but still isn’t highly radioactive. By comparison Plutonium-239 has a half-life of only 24,000 years, which means it is highly radioactive. Some isotopes have half-lives of minutes or seconds, others are considered “stable” which means they don’t decay at all.
So after 5 half-lives, only 1/32 of the origional isotope remains. But the dangerousness of a radioactive material depends on how much of it was present. So after 5 half-lives the substance would be giving of 1/32 of the initial radiation. But you can see that if you have a short half-life you’ve got a substance that gives off a lot of radiation but decays quickly, if you have a long half-life you have a substance that gives off only a little radiation but decays slowly.