I realize many of you won't understand why I in particular find this so funny, but oh the details for those who do understand... I give you Song Leader Revolution.

Wow. :)

I drove down to Tuscaloosa tonight for my once-a-year-or-so IEEE meeting presentation on behalf of my employer. I'm not sure why, but I decided to wander into the student center tonight and have a look around at what has changed. The official USPS post office for the campus is located on the bottom floor.

In the summer of 1993 when I was at my orientation session (probably June or July), one of the people presenting to us told us that although we would have a campus mail box for any dorm room we lived in, it would change each time we moved. This person pointed out that we could rent a PO box in the post office and keep that same address for as long as we were in school. Being the practical type, I liked that idea, and I think I went down and rented a box that day. I remember talking to the counter employee and relating what we had been told. He agreed that it was a smart idea.

I don't know their names, but his was one of two faces that became very familiar to me over the following five years. The Internet was still not widespread at that point, and I continued to keep in touch with several people through mail. I kept a close check on that box, and I can still feel the sense of kind of warm anticipation I used to get when I walked down to open it. I received some very special letters from some very special people over those years.

Sometime in May of 1998, I submitted my change of address form and turned in my key. I don't remember the specific details, but I remember feeling very strongly that the act of turning in that key was a tangible step into a new time in my life. I remember feeling a bit sad about it. That simple little box had been mine for so long, it was almost like a friend in some ways. It didn't seem right to me that someone else would get to use it.

Several times since then I have considered sending a short letter to whoever rents that box now, with the hope that it's actually another college student. Just a random note wishing the new owner well, and telling him/her a little bit about me and my time at UA. I know it's silly. That's why I've never actually done it.

Anyway, as I was wandering through the boxes tonight, I remembered that the new phone provided a convenient way to get a picture of the box. Of all the pictures of campus I've taken since I graduated, this one is perhaps the silliest, and yet perhaps the most meaningful to me. Isn't it weird how just a mailbox can mean so much?

Let's say your band was one of the biggest hitmakers of the late 70s and 80s. You went through your requisite Lead Singer Is a Megalomaniac Crisis^(tm) and went on hiatus for eight years or so. You managed to scrape everyone back together, record an album of totally new material, get nominated for a Grammy, and gear up to promote the album on tour. Then, just when everything looked like it was about to crank up again, your lead singer has a medical crisis, and it all hits the ground with a resounding THUD. What do you do?

Well, you fire your lead singer (who happens to have one of the most recognizable voices in power ballad history) and look for a new one. Lo and behold, out of the woodwork comes someone who sounds mostly like your old lead singer, and he even has the same first name. What luck! You get to tour again! So, back out on the road for another 8 years or so. Flog the old hits, record yet another new album of new material, etc. Things are going great... until your lead singer has a medical crisis and has to leave the band. What do you do?

Well, if you're Journey, you look on YouTube and find this video of a bar band in the Philippines. After picking your jaw up off the floor and recovering from the brain explosion, you call the guy (named Arnel Pineda) and offer him a job. Next thing you know, you're on stage in Chile performing to another screaming horde.

I have to think that Neal Schon and Jonathan Cain are SO TIRED of still playing those same songs 25 years later. I hope I'm wrong. I hope they're still having a blast. Here's to tenacity and the luck of the Irish!

Tonight's edition of Com-Pak Music Theater brings you more cheese and lots more hair. :)

Family legacies in pop music performance have always been fascinating to me (I'm going to post about Wilson Phillips one of these days), and I just recently learned that the duo behind (in front of?) tonight's band are "double-legacy." This family apparently made the Guinness Book for being the first one to produce #1 hits in three successive generations. When your grandparents are former radio, TV, and music stars, and your father is a former teen rock idol... Well, I won't say "what else can you do?" (plenty), but it was certainly in their blood.

Welcome tonight's guests: Matthew and Gunnar Nelson, best known for fronting the band that bears their family name. I'm not gonna go into a big thing about why I still like the music. *shrug* I just do. :) Anyway, as is typical for me, I'm just now catching up on 17 year-old music videos, and I'm more here to talk about the video. What just tickles me about this one is just how much attention someone paid to detail and little bits of humor in what is, essentially, a throwaway pop video. They dubbed the fully-reverbed-and-chorused vocals from the album over the first vocal line in the video ("Here she comes."), and the funny part is to watch Matthew in the video look up and around to see where all the reverb came from. I laugh at that every time I see it. :) There's little touches like the "VAGUE" cover (watch for the model to pop back up later).

What amazes me, though, is how much work they put into things. They're pulling the trick where the video speeds up and slows down, but watch Gunnar and Matthew closely: their lip-syncing and strumming [mostly] stay with the 1x-speed music. That had to be tough to do (probably involved some really silly-sounding fast and slow music on the set). There are sections where they do the video backwards (especially at the end) and still lip-sync forwards. None of this is rocket science, but it's just a lot more work than I would have expected for a video like this.

Nelson: (Can't Live Without Your) Love and Affection (1990)

Also, the guitar melody (with that little trill) is one of my favorite musical elements in the song, and it was neat to hear them play it with the acoustics (especially with that 12-string Matthew is using).

On that subject, I gotta throw one more at you. The video itself is not all that exciting for me (especially the over-done heavy-handed "Don't listen. You can do anything you want." message). However, once you get past that, they take the video as a chance to splice on a musical intro that sounds like something they might use at a concert. It's a little thing and easily done, but it added another facet to music that I already really enjoyed. By the way... I would so hang that poster up here in the computer room if I could get my hands on one. :)

Nelson: After The Rain (1990)

Oh, and I think all the hair-tossing is just absolutely hilarious specifically because of how cliché it looks now. :)

This is twice now that one of Thomas's journal entries has sent me off to find really cool things on the interweb.

This time it was a cool video he embedded in his entry. It's of a group of electric string performers playing a very lively medley of familiar tunes. Hearing it took me back to my 7th grade year. I was a member of an area honor band that year, and one of the songs we played for our concert was a piece called "Instant Concert" by Harold L. Walters. It's a medley piece that romps through snippets from something like 30 different well-known pieces of music... all at a constant tempo. It was an absolute blast, and ever since I've been able to remember the melody all the way through.

I did a bit of poking around in Google, and I found out that playing this one song might actually give me something in common with more people in the world than most things I've done. Go to YouTube and search for "Instant Concert". I found 10 different videos of people playing this exact song, and several of them are of people that don't speak English. :) I think my favorite band performance is the performance by the Nanyang Junior College Symphonic Band (from Singapore). You have to skip to 4 minutes into the video to get to "Instant Concert." It's reasonably well-recorded compared to the others, and they do a very good job playing it.

My favorite link of all, though, was of a video made by some band kids who were apparently blowing off some steam and had obviously played this song a bunch of times. They decided to sing it for fun. Amazingly, I'm able to get past the fact that they're hideously off-key, because I can so see myself having done this back in school. I was laughing through the whole video and singing right along. :)

It is indeed a small world.

I just noticed today that my senior memory meme post has no question 12. I didn't skip it. Eeyore didn't have one either. At first I was going to be all boring and just try to find out what the missing question was, but then I figured out that this is the perfect opportunity for reader participation!

That's right! You, my 3 lucky readers, have a once-in-a lifetime chance. :) Drop in a comment that contains what you think should have been question number 12 about my senior year of high school. I will answer all questions from people I know (so don't ask what you don't want to know!), and I'll probably answer even if I don't know you. Just be sure I have your email address... I reserve the right not to answer publicly. :)

Stolen shamelessly from Eeyore:

Fill this out about your SENIOR year of high school! The longer ago it was, the more fun the answers will be.

1. Who was your best friend? John Hancock. No, I'm serious. :)

2. What sports did you play? Well, according to the plaque that I have stored away somewhere, I lettered in varsity basketball my senior year but played no other sports. :) I was the statistician for the girls' varsity team that year.

3. What kind of car did you drive? A maroon 1976 Volkswagen Beetle with aluminum mag wheels. Oh. And fuzzy dice. It was unmistakable.

4. It's Friday night, where were you? During the fall, I was in uniform being trumpet section leader for the band. It's one of the things I actually do miss about high school. Once football season was over, I was probably at home. I can count the number of dates I had in high school on one hand.

5. Were you a party animal? *snork* Seriously. Do I even need to answer this one?

6. Were you considered a flirt? It depends on who you ask. In general, no way. I had my moments, though.

7. Were you in band, orchestra, or choir? Band. I played trumpet from 5th grade up, and I was section leader all but my first year marching.

8. Were you a nerd? What's this past tense thing you're using? But yes. Beyond a shadow of a doubt. Cumulative high school average of something like 98.18/100 (we didn't do the 4.0 GPA scale thing). In my class that was good enough to get salutatorian. :)

9. Did you get suspended/expelled? Are you kidding? It got back to me years later that the principal actually delayed an intended policy banning backpacks by one year to allow me to graduate after he found out I really liked carrying a backpack. ("I just can't do it to him. He shakes my hand in the hall!")

10. Can you sing the fight song? Probably, but I'm not sure I'd get all the words right. I can play both the trumpet and baritone parts from memory, though. The baritone player was one of my best friends, and we would often swap horns for at least one iteration of the song. I also knew the silly chant used to the teach the snare part to the fresh meat ("Come to the table, ABC the goldfish, Come to the table, ABC the goldfish").

11. Who was your favorite teacher? Oh, I'm not touching that one. I can't pick, anyway. If I did, though, I wouldn't be able to go home again.

13. School mascot? Wildcats

14. Did you go to Prom? Nope. All that sinful dancin', you know. Actually, though, by the time I was a senior, it wasn't as much about that as it was that from every direction I was getting the message that I had to go. That pretty much by itself meant that I wasn't going to. Instead, I went to a multi-church-sponsored event specifically designed for prom refugees.

15. If you could go back and do it over, would you? Emphatically no. Does anyone ever really want to relive their teenage years?

16. What do you remember most about graduation? As we were lining up outside (minutes before it started), I was asked to sing the alma mater for the ceremony. I had to learn the words on the spot (I had been playing it every year since 6th grade and had the 1st trumpet part memorized, but I'd never sung it).

17. Where were you on senior skip day? Are you kidding? I was in school. A classmate of mine has shown up (in the comments below) and corrected my addled memory. :) The school's Scholars Bowl (basically a quiz bowl) team went to a competition in Tuscaloosa that year. I remember that trip very well (I drove one of the cars), but I didn't remember that it was on senior skip day.

18. Did you have a job your senior year? Yep. Worked as a deli cook/cashier at the convenience store next to the school from something like middle of my sophomore year until I left for college.

19. Where did you go most often for lunch? No one was allowed to leave campus for lunch.

20. Have you gained weight since then? Uh. Yes. *snork* :) I'm convinced that this is the reason why I won the "most changed" award at our reunion dinner.

21. What did you do after graduation? Right after graduation, me and my closest friends in the class went over to one of their houses and had a pool party. I'll never forget that night. It was the perfect endcap on my high school career. These were my "Scoobies" in school. Now if only I could remember who won that game of chicken in the pool... me and Chastity, or Michael and Samantha. :)

22. When did you graduate? May of 1993.

23. Who was your Senior prom date? No prom for me, and no date to the substitute function.

24. Are you going / did you go to your 10 year reunion? Yep. Went, took my wife, had a BLAST snarking with one of my best friends, wrote a post about it.

25. Who was your home room teacher? Kind of an anticlimactic last question, isn't it? :) I don't remember. They were messing around with how our schedules worked, so I'm not sure we had a traditional "home room" that year.

In the category of the power of memory...

I just picked up a copy of a guilty pleasure from Second Spin on the cheap: Electric Youth by Debbie Gibson. I was getting ready to rip it just a few minutes ago, and something really weird happened. My eyes rested on the title of the opening track ("Who Loves Ya Baby?"), and in the space of about 2 seconds, my mind went from the title to a mental sound clip of the chorus to the smell of the ink used to print the liner notes for my old cassette copy (which was stolen along with the rest of my collection over 13 years ago).

I've heard before that smell is the sense most strongly tied to memory, but I've never had it go "backwards" like that before. For whatever reason, that tape's liner notes had a strong and distinct scent that none of my other tapes had, so I smelled it every time I opened up the case (which was REALLY often about 8th or 9th grade or so). I guess the association in my brain was stronger than I thought. :)

Thanks to Thomas for the cool link that got me started on this one.

First, anyone who watches Mythbusters must see this Flash animation.

Seen it? Okay. Jamie's technobabble over the big diagram reminded me of an old electrical engineering in-joke: the turboencabulator. I have known for a long time about a video incarnation of this joke apparently made by some folks at Rockwell: The Rockwell Automation Retroencabulator.

However, what I didn't realize is that Chrysler took a shot at this old joke even earlier: The Chrysler Turboencabulator. Keep listening. There are some screw-the-customer jokes at the end.

I love how this old joke just keeps coming back.

Bonus for the Mythbusters fans
Do pretty girls fart?
I hope they pay the poor girl well.