Musical References to Music

A few days ago, my daughter and I were singing along to Lynard Skynard's "Sweet Home Alabama". When it got to the verse:
Well, I heard Mister Young sing about her
Well, I heard ole Neil put her down.
Well, I hope Neil Young will remember
A southern man don't need him around anyhow.
I asked Annie if she would like to hear Neil Young's song they mentioned there. What song? was her response. We talked about the lyrics, and she agreed to listen to "Southern Man" by Neil Young. After hearing it, her opinion was that it was not a very good song, and she wasn't surprised Lynard Skynard didn't like it either. That made me laugh.

But it got me to thinking about songs that make direct (and oblique) references to other songs, bands, or singers. The one that popped into my mind almost instantly was American Pie, by Don McLean. There are many references in this song, but the one that stands out for me is, "The birds flew off with the fallout shelter Eight miles high and falling fast", which I always took as a reference to the Byrds' song, "Eight Miles High".

The next was "Major Tom (Coming Home)" by Peter Schilling, which I take as either a response or sequel to, or parody of, David Bowie's "Space Oddity". Although, in this case, the reference is not to a singer or a band, but to Major Tom, a character in David Bowie's song.

Finally, there's Stevie Wonder's song "Sir Duke", which gives a quick list of musical pioneers: Count Basie, Glenn Miller, Satchmo (Louis Armstrong), "Sir" Duke Ellington, and Ella Fitzgerald.

Anyway, I thought it would be cool to begin to collect a list of songs that contain references to other songs/singers/bands. If you know of one, please add it as a comment to this post.

Deep-Rooted in Christ

Started reading "Deep-Rooted in Christ", by Joshua Choonmin Kang. :-)
Subtitle is, "The way of transformation".

Lost my copy of "Mastering Regular Expressions". It is a good book that I'd like to finish. So, I'll have to buy another one I suppose.

Burping Omega-3 Goodness

Omega-3 burps: bathing my esophagus with the oily aroma of warm fishy vapors.

Tolerance and Indifference

Interesting (but possibly misleading) quite from Forbes: "It is easy to be tolerant when you do not care." -Clement F. Rogers

I understand this to mean that indifference, carelessness, or just plain laziness can sometimes look like the virtue of tolerance. I do NOT believe that tolerance is the same as carelessness, or that the basis of tolerance is indifference, or that a tolerant man is just intellectually lazy or morally compromised.

But it can happen.

When Envy Presumes Pride

I wonder how many accusations of "pride" are actually motivated by envy?

For example, if you see someone driving a beautiful car, or see a really well-kept home from the street, do you presume that the owner is proud of it and obsessed with its appearance? Why would you think that? Particularly toward people whom you don't know and have never met?

I do not know, but for myself, the possible explanations are:

• I would be tempted to feel that way if in the other person's shoes. So I project that same feeling on them.


• I know people who were clearly obsessed with their possessions, and had negative experiences because of it. So, I may initially ascribe this same flaw in others who happen to have a nice car or house.


• Pride and conceit are common vices, and so it's highly likely they are guilty of pride regardless. Particularly in the SF Bay Area, and Silicon Valley. The problem for me here is the "guilty until proven innocent" mentality.


• It feels better to accuse someone else of a vice (like pride) rather than recognize it as my own (envy).

Mastering Regular Expressions

I'm reading "Mastering Regular Expressions" by Jeffrey Friedl, and really enjoying it. Not only is it a topic that I find very interesting, but Jeffrey does a great job of leading you (and challenging you) on a path of discovering the power of regex. The narrative is sometimes a bit too self-conscious (the author never lets you forget that it's HIM doing the talking), but that can be forgiven because the book is well written and interesting.

I don't read a lot of technical, "geeky" books, so I don't have a broad base for comparison. But this is definitely the best I've read. So far, my only quibble is that he says that regex should be pronounced with a hard G, as in regular, rather than a soft G, as in regina. I haven't met a programmer yet who pronounces it this way, some of whom have been using regex for many years. We pronounce it rej'eks. Personally, I find reg'eks awkward to pronounce.

Do Unto Others...

I've heard smug critics of the Golden Rule say that better formula would have been, "Do unto others as they would have you do unto them", providing as their test case a masochist. You would not want a masochist doing to you as the masochist would have you do to them.

Such criticism seemed overtly clever and cynical to me to ever take seriously. Still a pithy response felt appropriate, for those who still suffered from the illusion that this was a reasonable argument against the wisdom of Jesus.

A response did not occur to me till recently (after hearing about Russian psychologists who discovered that corporal punishment helped end depression - and some wag commented that they must have been masochist inmates). Basically, it follows the pattern that extreme or 'edge' cases do not make good law, or that a hypothesis is not required to incorporate outlying data (explain, yes -- incorporte, no), or that a reasonable explanation of an event need not respect the ideas or opinions of the insane...

It is simply that, moral codes need not respect the motivations of the mentally ill.