Thursday, July 28, 2005

I just love stripping wallpaper... (Hmm... I forget how well ironic understatement comes over when written down*.)

I just hate stripping wallpaper...

I spent the whole day today stripping the wallpaper off Dan's new house. As I arrived at his place I realised that, although I remembered to take a couple CDs, I had forgotten to pick up the radio/CD player I use to keep myself company on jobs like this.

Big mistake.

My main trouble with stripping wallpaper is the world's most annoying advertising jingle - ever! - which starts going round and round in my head as soon as I start. Alfred Bester once wrote an SF novel in which a murderer kept himself from having his mind read by the police telepaths by filling his head full of the most irritating, compulsive advertizing jingle - I think this is it.

If I tell you this fucking jingle has been lodged in my brain for over 20 years, and is even more annoying and hateful than the "Tasty - Tasty, they're very very tasty" Bran Flakes jingle which used to have me scream and leap across the room to turn it down - I used to get exercise before we had a TV with a remote - or even, God help us, "Do the Shake 'n' Vac and put the freshness back..." (ditto) I think you'll understand my state of mind after 6 hours without any music to keeping the thing at bay. Now it's out of its cage the sodding thing is going to be buzzing round my conciousness for weeks now.

To the tune of Blood Sweat and Tears' Spinning Wheel

'What goes up,
must come down,
Super Fresco is so easy,
It's by Graham & Brown...'

That's it.
That's all of it.
Over and over again.
Round and round my fucking head like a painted pony... Argggghhhhh!

It was an advert for wallpaper that was easy to remove. Why easy removal was a selling point I can't imagine. I mean wallpaper is not something you change that often is it? "It's Tuesday, it must be time to re-paper the living-room darling!" No, if I have stuck something to the wall with buckets full of glue I want it to bloody stay there not come off in vast swathes every time some horrible child picks at a corner.

The CD player is in the back of the car already. I'm not going through that again tomorrow.

Dan is being discharged from Hospital on Tuesday. About 2 weeks earlier than we were expecting and about 2 weeks before his house will be ready to live in. I'll just have to pull out all the stops and get it painted as fast as possible before the carpets are laid. Not that they have even been ordered yet. Damn. There goes my weekend.

...

To the arsehole in the metalic turquoise Merc who cut me up at the roundabout coming out of the Fort, then bombed it off at 40+ in a 30 mile zone (Reg Number R619 HRP, officer) - It's going to take more than a pissy Jesus Fish bumper sticker to save you if you try that in front of someone who can't stop as fast as I can, like an HGV for instance. 'I'm rich, I'm a tourist, and I believe in God' does not make you bombproof. Twat. But thank you for getting that damn jingle out of my head for a few interesting seconds.


*
- twice!

.

2 comments:

Phoebe J. Southwood said...

LOL! I'm so sorry.

Sometimes, our brains are our enemies, non?

Tyler has a strange deficiency which allows him to only remember one or two lines of a song. Those lines go through his head over and over, and sometimes he comes to me to finish the verse so that he may be released. I'm amazed I didn't find him jibbering in the corner of his cottage when I returned from a month away.

The number one example of this:

"Ridin along in my automobile"

Ridin along in my automobile
Ridin along in my automobile
Ridin along in my automobile
Ridin along in my automobile
Ridin along in my automobile
Ridin along in my automobile
Ridin along in my automobile
Ridin along in my automobile
Ridin along in my automobile

You get the picture.

The other little song that got us both was from an episode of South Park that was an expose on the Canadian Comedy team Terrance and Phillip.

When they first started out, they sang a song that went like this:

Chicken and ham
Chicken and ham
Chicken and ham
Chicken and ham

I can't give you the melody. It would be like Superman giving you a map to the kryptonite mine.

***

Might I add that your critical driving skills have become quite accute in a very short period of time! Well done! If you still lived in LA, you'd be the "Falling Down" guy by now!
(giggle! - I really can't imagine you toting a machine gun and looking all serious about it!)

Anonymous said...

Aarrgh, it's in my head now, you bastard!

What's more worrying is the way, now old enough to know better, I still constantly find that advertising jingles I knew and loved were actually rip-offs of proper songs that I was too much of a philistine to know. Like the old 5-4-3-2-1 choc bar one. You mean it wasn't originally written as "First bite into smooth milk chocolate (5-4-3-2-1)..."?? Worse still is that, because I heard the ad version first, I invariably prefer it to the original when I eventually discover it. Please god, never tell me that the Um Bongo music is a bastardised version of a Leonard Cohen ballad...

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