Showing posts with label Weird Al Yankovic. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Weird Al Yankovic. Show all posts

Sunday, September 29, 2019

Big Elf on a Mayonnaise Man (volume II)




 Flee to me, remote elf--Sal a dewan desired;
 Now is a Late-Petal Era.
 We fade: lucid Iris, red Rose of Sharon;
 Goldenrod a silly ram ate.
 Wan olives teem (ah, Satan lives!);
 A star eyes pale Roses.




 Revel, big elf on a mayonnaise man -
 A tinsel baton-dragging nice elf too.
 Lisp, Oh Sibyl, dragging Nola along;
 Niggardly bishops I loot.
 Fleecing niggard notables Nita names,
 I annoy a man of Legible Verse.




 So relapse, ye rats,
 As evil Natasha meets Evil
 On a wet, amaryllis-adorned log.
 Norah's foes' orders (I ridiculed a few) are late, pet.
 Alas, I wonder! Is Edna wed?
 Alas--flee to me, remote elf.




I recently posted a brilliant Weird Al parody of Bob Dylan singing Subterranean Homesick Blues entirely in palindromes (which, quite frankly, made about as much sense as most of his lyrics). It was so exquisitely funny that I just KEPT laughing at it as I watched it over and over and over again. This got me thinking about the art or science of the palindrome, how I`ve never really composed a good one myself, and how many there are lurking around that would only make sense in a sort of verbal Twilight Zone.





Though "Flee to me, remote elf" - titled The Faded Bloomers Rhapsody, for some unknown reason - is universally believed to be the world's longest palindrome (and if you don't believe me, just go to the end of the thing and read it backwards), I was not able to find it on Google except for the first line, which was used as the title of some song or other. I was extremely irritated, because I had no trouble at all finding it in 2012 when I first posted it (along with these images - too good NOT to repeat). Has the internet perhaps become a little less literate in almost 8 years? It wouldn't surprise me. It's a sinking ship now, weighed down by unbelievably shoddy filler and outright garbage. Finding the good stuff is getting harder than ever.
















I first encountered the "Flee to me" tour de force (written by one Howard W. Bergerson, not known for writing anything else) in a book called An Almanac of Words at Play by Willard Espy, which I believe I still have somewhere (and first read in the 1970s). Some of the word-games in there are likely NOT on the internet, because no one would get them now due to the mass lowering of IQ which has taken place over the past ten years or so. So I may just replicate some of them in future posts, even if I have to scan the buggers. It might just be worth it.



 

SPECIAL BONUS `DROMES!

Satan, oscillate my metallic sonatas

Tired nude man, in a pajama I am. A japan I named under it.

A Santa Lived As a Devil At NASA
 
Are we not drawn onward, we few, drawn onward to new era ?


 


Saturday, September 28, 2019

Weird Al Yankovic - BOB





I don't know how I've lived up 'til now without hearing this song! Weird Al has been around forever, my kids grooved to "Eat It" (his Michael Jackson parody of "Beat It"), and now my grandkids are digging him too. But I never dug QUITE this much dig in two and a half minutes. This is why it  is sometimes worth it to watch those "top ten artists who hate Bob Dylan"-type of things on YouTube, because, bad as they often are, they can lead you to to a musical Valhalla like this.

I've always loved palindromes, and I guess it was the sudden Zenlike realization that Bob IS a palindrome that set this thing in motion. Good palindromes almost make sense, or a kind of peculiar-to-the-palindrome-universe sense, a world alarmingly askance and atilt. There can be a sense of apocalypse in some of them, or an economy that is almost scary. Like Dylan, a palindrome can say so much with so little that they appear here as small lyric miracles.

"Bob"

I, man, am regal - a German am I
Never odd or even
If I had a hi-fi
Madam, I'm Adam
too hot to hoot
No lemons, no melon
Too bad I hid a boot
Lisa Bonet ate no basil
Warsaw was raw
Was it a car or a cat I saw?

Rise to vote, sir
Do geese see God?
"Do nine men interpret?" "Nine men," I nod
Rats live on no evil star
Won't lovers revolt now?
Race fast, safe car
Pa's a sap
Ma is as selfless as I am
May a moody baby doom a yam?

Ah, Satan sees Natasha
No devil lived on
Lonely Tylenol
Not a banana baton
No "x" in "Nixon"
O, stone, be not so
O Geronimo, no minor ego
"Naomi," I moan
"A Toyota's a Toyota"
A dog, a panic in a pagoda

Oh no! Don Ho!
Nurse, I spy gypsies - run!
Senile felines
Now I see bees I won
UFO tofu
We panic in a pew
Oozy rat in a sanitary zoo
God! A red nugget, a fat egg under a dog!
Go hang a salami, I'm a lasagna hog