Earworms!
Lady Madonna lying on the bed
Listen to the music playing in your head
Both CNN (link to Netscape site) and the BBC have articles today about those songs that run through your head when you wish they wouldn’t. These are the worst, according to University of Cincinnati researcher James Kellaris:
Top 3 Songs That Get Stuck In Your Head
1. "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"
2. "Baby Back Ribs" jingle from Chili's Restaurant
3. "Who Let the Dogs Out?"
Personally, I don’t find these things annoying at all. They’re a helluva lot better than a lot of other things that can happen in an idle brain. My least favorite thing is imaginary arguments that can result in real anger and do no real good at all (although they can lead to useful blog material, they rarely do. Maybe if one had an AM radio call-in show where all you do is venting, but not written words). The tunes, they’re kinda fun. Sometimes you wonder what set one off. None of the “Top 3” affect me, but the words to Zappa’s Dog Breath hit me nearly daily:
Primer mi carucha, chevy ’39
Going to el monte legion stadium
Pick up on my weesa, she is so divine
Helps me stealing hubcaps, wasted all the time
That one happens in the shower, while walking, or driving to work. The bad ones are the themes to Green Acres or The Chicken Dance. What if you suddenly start sing them aloud and someone hears? You only have one reputation, as Mom used to say.
My fascination with these mental melodies is not as deep as that of Mr. Kellaris, but one idea I’d been toying with is carrying around a small notepad to write down all the tunes that happen in a normal day. Sometimes a word or phrase will set them off and that dialogue would make a great canvas for it all. It wouldn’t work so well on a blog, absent the music, though I guess that could be done if you have a lot of storage space. Nothing dramatic, just a little soundtrack for an ordinary day.
One person triggers an instrumental burst in my mind whenever he walks by. He’s white, but he resembles Chuck Berry. He always seem to appear out of nowhere, I have no idea what his name is, he walks by briskly and then disappears again. I’ve never heard him say a word. He might be an apparition, but nothing out of the ordinary happens before or after he passes through. Lately, I’ll look up and see him and hear the opening guitar break to Johnny B. Goode, just 4 bars, and then he’s gone, a walking paragraph mark in my working day.
4:39:47 PM 
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