Tuesday 20 March 2012

Keeping it in the family: You're doing it right - and legally!

Julie and me, like any other couple, have our differences in taste. While I'll read lots of stuff, across the board, including hard science, fantasy, travel writing etc, etc... Julie, on the other hand, will tend to stick to chick-lit, with the occasional celebrity bio thrown in for good measure. She listens to good ol' pop music, cheap, cheesy and cheerful and thinks that stuff like Radiohead is dreary, morose nonsense... er... actually, I pretty much agree with her about that last bit, but you get the idea.

Despite our views on each other's likes, there exists a certain amount of middle ground. Of course there is. There has to be for any relationship to survive, just as you also need the differences for that middle ground to exist. We both like musicals, Mock The Week, games of Scrabble and watching The Muppet Show. Whether or not you like them, you know the Muppets - if nothing else, the amount of publicity the recent film has been given means the only people unaware of it currently reside in the supermassive black hole at the centre of our galaxy. And even then, I'm not sure.

Returning to the point, we were sat together watching a classic episode (1976! And it still feels somewhat progressive!), one which had quite a few high spots. However, with the way Muppet humour goes, I found myself, on more than one occasion, turning my head to give my wife a steady look. It does have to be said that much of what they were coming out with could so very easily have been uttered by my darling, off-beat wife.
Things carried on in this vein for a while, until I was in danger of giving myself repetitive strain injury. The final straw came in the form of a Muppet musical number, courtesy of the stereotypical hillbilly Gogolala Jubilee Jugband.


Now, I hope this is internationally viewable, or this post is going to fall flatter than a pancake under an elephant's arse...


It's actually good for me to watch this again, as I spent most of the first time giving Julie The Look.
Tell you what, just in case you weren't able to watch The Muppets' version, here's Ray Stevens with his own version of the song - complete with an in-video graph that is either very helpful or just makes things worse.


Hopefully, you could watch one of those two clips. Now, you see why I had Julie in mind when this came on? Even she agrees that "I'm my own grandpa" is hilariously baffling.
One final stab at making sense of this, OK? Here's a nice, clear chart depicting all the relationships and familial ties referred to in the song.


...nope. I'm still baffled.
Mind you, it doesn't help that I spent much of the song thinking to myself, "why does this remind me of Bill Wyman?" Maybe, you pillock, it's because the ex-Rolling Stone did almost exactly this. You see, the dirty old man married an 18 year-old girl, but then his son married her mother... I did wonder whether it had been written with him in mind, but it turns out that the song was originally released in 1947. I know Bill's knocking on a bit, but I doubt he's that old...

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