😲DAISY: "ONE MORE TIME!"😲

Oh God. This "Daisy" thing - it started out with another video, a creepy thing featuring the FIRST EVER computer to be programmed to "sing" (IBM something-or-other - I don't retain numbers very well). This was in 1961, so ANYTHING a computer"sang" sounded miraculous. The weird, robotic recording reminded me of Stephen Hawking, and I just had to use it for something - so I put it together with a visual from another bizarre talking-robot video, completely unrelated. They just looked cool together, though they were never meant to be synchronized.

Though I did not realize it at the time, the 1961 audio of "Daisy" had blown up on TikTok. I was/am barely aware of TikTok except as a rude presence on YouTube, or something my grandgirls giggle over. At this point, apparently due to the TikTok phenomenon, my own video has had well over 3,500,000 views - yes, I mean THREE AND A HALF MILLION, and my subscriber count has jumped from about 300 to well over 8,000. All because of "Daisy", and a TikTok video I knew nothing about.

BUT, then I started thinking about another version of "Daisy" - the one many of us recognize from "2001: A Space Odyssey" (and I have to spell the title out so people won't think I'm referring to 9-11). In the most memorable scene in the whole movie, Dave is shutting down the evil computer HAL, and as his mind becomes increasingly childish, he begins to sing. . . "Daisy", getting slower and slower as he runs out of juice, or whatever it is that makes computers "go". 

A LOT of people became confused because my first video talked about the "2001" version. So I found it and glommed it on to Motormouth again, this time in slow motion. Which version is creepier? I think the HAL one, because as he slowly loses all his intellectual powers, it creates the macabre impression that a computer is "dying". 

It's obvious to me now that HAL's song was a sly reference to the 1961 IBM version, but only hard-core techno-geeks would have gotten the joke. And think about it: the movie came out in 1968, only seven years later.