definitely a summer saturday --- blue skies

[fflo]

It's so warm and humid that even at 10 a.m. I had to push the button on the stove 7 or 8 times while the kettle for my coffee boiled.

That's cuz my stove has this notoriously failing part (if you're dying of curiosity, Google around with "Magic Chef" and "F1") that makes it spontaneously beep & flash an error code, loudly & continuously, until you push a button---and the phenom occurs at (more or less) random intervals (albeit influenced in frequency by this heat/humidity factor). So you have to keep the thing unplugged most of the time. But only in the summer: this is my contribution to scholarship on the issue. I won't detail how I figured that out, and, frankly, I doubt it'd pay to write it up, cuz most people with the problem just shell out for its repair, even though it'll just happen again down the line. Or they buy a new stove.

I consider it an eccentricity of the house that's one of its ways of speaking to me. It's a little bit like the thing in that TV Show "Lost" with the button that has to be pushed---only the consequence of my not pushing it is just more loud beeping. (I feel terrible when I forget to unplug the stove & come home to find the cats have been listening to the beep for who knows how long.)

Anyway, I had a pleasant session of (overdue) kitchen attending-to this morning during the end of This American Life and all of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me (my favorite show on radio---or TV---right now), and then WEMU went into jazz, and the first song is what brought me here to post. "We'll start with the first lady of song," said the dj, as I wiped the last of the crumbs from where the now-clean cutting board had been. "Goody!" thought I. And a snappy intro started, and I got a bubbly feeling, and then I was hearing one of my favorite cuts of Ella's: Blue Skies.

That song, an old Irving Berlin number, is so lively in her hands (well, lungs & throat & mouth & head & soul & cetera). For years I've thought of it as one of the happiest recorded songs I know about. If I'm feeling the least little bit undeniably good, I can parlay that shit by calling up Ella's Blue Skies, and singing it or humming or whistling it or just playing it in my head. I was just singing it in the elevator at work a coupla weeks ago, and had to make myself stop when I got out, so's not to intrude on any serious thinking that might have been going on with the mathematicians.

Never saw the sun
Shinin' so bright
Never saw things
Going so right

Noticing the days
Hurrying by
When you're in love
My, how they fly

Those blue days
All of them gone
Nothin' but blue skies
From now on

I'm not in love, and things may or may not have gone righter some other time, and I bet there are some other-than-blue skies coming, but somehow my usual itch to think of words literally doesn't pertain when I start warbling this one to feel the good of a good mood more, longer, bigger, more bodily--- whatevah.

It's so up-tempo in Ella's recording that she whizzes through the song and gets right to the scat---which has bits of other tunes in it, most notably (and not as odd as it might sound) Rhapsody in Blue---and then she's back to lyrics again, kicking it up at least 2 or 3 notches. Maybe even 4 1/2! Check it out & see what you think.

Guess you could say I like the song.

So now I'm off to have a Saturday. Hope you enjoy(ed) yours!

Comments

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

Wait Wait Don't Tell Me

1) I always root for Paula Poundstone. You?

B) Ever think you'd rather have your answering machine message recorded by the person who lost for the listener than by Carl Cassel?

[fflo.livejournal.com]

a) but of course!

2) Mostly I think about whether it would be more wisely strategic in the limerick contest just to listen to the rhyme words, with half an ear to other content words, or actually try to cognize what the little poem is saying.

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

II) I think you're right about the limerick contest. I think that works about 80% of the time, since the questions tend to be like this:

He wanted some food for his dish
A cheap protien source was his wish
He took on a notion
To search in the ocean
And found a new species of______

"Lobster! I read how they discovered a new hairy lobster a few weeks ago"

I remember the contestant who answered every question like that. She seemed not to get the idea of rhyme. What made it hilarious was that she was an English teacher.

I think that one of the limericks today actually had two possible reasonable rhymes, though.

[fflo.livejournal.com]

I don't remember today's limericks, I confess. Guess I could check online. Sometimes when I miss the show I listen at work later in the week.