Story telling in music

I was updating my iTunes last week and one of the songs in my collection is an old recording by Marty Robbins called The Streets of Laredo.

It's about a young cowboy that's met with an untimely end and the singer, Robbins in this case, has come across the young cowboy wrapped in white linen.

I went downstairs and was singing away in the kitchen when my wife heard me and commented on how I had morphed the song into an old Irish folk song.

I stopped singing.

I forgot about it until tonight when I was back at the computer organising my iTunes library and saw the Marty Robbins recording again. I had a listen. It was exactly as I was singing it.

I was confused.

I went to the web (not the internet I add.. more on that later) and searched for the lyrics of the Streets of Laredo. Then I did a search for the Irish folk song by the phrase "beat the drum slowly".

Sure enough the two songs are remarkably similar.

Check it out. First the chorus from The Streets of Laredo:

Oh, beat the drum slowly, and play the fife lowly
And play the dead march as you carry me along
Take me to the green valley and lay the earth o'er me
For I'm a poor cowboy and I know I've done wrong.

Now the chorus from The Green Fields of France (the Irish Folk song)

Did they beat the drum slowly did they play the fife lowly
Did they sound the death march as they lowered you down
Did the band play the last post and chorus
Did the pipes play the flowers of the forest

The first 2 lines are remarkably similar.

So the real question is which one came first? I'm guessing the Irish folk song pre-dates the Streets of Laredo but I might be wrong.

I've come across examples before where tunes from folk music have been borrowed and rearranged for contemporary recordings (Belfast Child recorded by Simple Minds and Words recorded by The Christians being two obvious examples) but I've never come across anything where lyrics are common (or almost common) between two records.

Tell me please if this is in fact common.

To play it safe in future I will only sing the first 2 lines of the chorus and then whistle the rest. The tune to the chorus is obviously similar too.

Far-side angst

That's the best term I could come up with for it.

Driving home on the M50 today all I could see on the other side of the carriageway was one slow snaking line of cars and trucks going nowhere. And the further I drove the longer the line stretched.

Until then I came to the back of the line. Just beyond there I passed some cars flying along merrily, heading for this terrible queue.

That's when I experienced it. Far-side angst. I wanted to roll down the window and shout "wait, there's a big line of cars ahead. It's terrible. Let me warn you.." or something like that.

I somehow felt the need, as I often do, to send my best wishes for a speedy clearance of traffic to those poor unfortunate northbound drivers.

Alas I quickly lost my train of thought and my mind filled with ideas of food and drink. And those poor fools rushed to the back of the line, wearing out tyres and brake pads in the process while I sailed effortlessly south.

Touching terabytes

I remember when a Terabyte sounded like a lot of storage in a computer and it wasn't that long ago.

Now I'm thinking of going out and buying one of those external hard drive things to store my music, my videos and all my files because my PC is running out of space.

The thing is to buy something with a high data transfer rate.

There's nothing worse than sitting there watching the files fly from left to right and watching the time remaining counter count down.

We are modern computer users. We REFUSE to wait. For anything.

I'm tempted by S-ATA. It has a data transfer speed 6 times faster than USB 2. Wait! Am I losing you here? Nope. Good.

As I was saying, S-ATA looks like a good option. The problem is the Laptop. If it doesn't support S-ATA off the side of the system then it's a waste of time surely.

You can buy a little USB2 to S-ATA adapter but the USB port is limited to 480 Mb/s so you'll have a bottleneck right there surely. I might be wrong. Anyone know if this is true?

OK. Got to go and finish copying these files from one system to another. Anything for some free hard drive space.

Celebrity madness

Sheryl Crow thinks she's going to tell me how much toilet paper I can use when I go to the bathroom? Is that what she#s after?

These celebrities are clearly mad.

She's parading around on a bio-bus educating people about climate change.

And she thinks this is a good idea.

Call me crazy but how about banning food colourings, artificial sweeteners, extremely dangerous household cleaning products (the ones you need to wear rubber gloves to use), dishwasher tablets, Nuclear power stations, Nitrous oxide gas canisters for boy racers... you get the idea.

I mean where is this celeb-fuelled education going to end?

Imploring people to re-use their own urine to brush their teeth?

Gun control

I'm disturbed by the events in Virginia this past week. The terrible shootings. The blame flying around.



And today the apalling publication and broadcasting of video and photos of what must clearly have been a deeply disturbed person.



I just can't see what positive outcome can possibly come from airing the videos sent to NBC.



Editors have a hard job these days. However there's something wrong surely when the editorial decision is whether to report the news or to become the news.



This is not dissimilar to the publication of cartoons by various european newspapers in 2005, a decision to publish which quickly became the news.



Likewise this instance. At some point the reporting of the news becomes the news. Is this what news is now about?



Having said that, it's also disturbing to see networks such as the BBC carrying stories about the NBC airing and then providing a link to this mad video too.



Someone somewhere needs to make a firm decision not to publicise this recording any further.

One of these days

Many years ago I was traveling a fair bit to the US. There was this song on the radio all the time called one of these days.



It was about this guy who did a bunch of stuff when he was young and it kind of stayed with him and sort of troubled him.



One of the things he (the character in the song) did was to pick on this kid, as the song goes they used to call him Freckle-face or something like that.



I remember there being a guy in my class in school that people used to do the same. They used to call him ugly-wugly. The poor guy was no Marlon Brando that's for sure but then again who is.. other than Marlon Brando.



Anyway, I heard that song in the car the other day and for some bizarre reason my mind instantly (and for the first time) transported me back to that time many years ago and I thought about that guy.



I thought about how people used to call that guy names and slag him off. I'm not sure what made me think of that time because I've heard that song loads of times and never made that connection before.



Then just about the time when I was starting to think that it was bad that people used to call him names I remembered that he used to regularly help himself to the collection basket at the local church.

Little guy's haircut

Tomorrow I'm going to take my soon-to-be 5 year old to the barber shop for a haircut. He could do with a cut and he's old enough now to go.

We used to take him to one of those kids places where kids sit in little cars and watch TV while the person cuts the hair, but the one near our home has closed down.

Recently my wife has been cutting his hair and doing a super job. I tried that recently with our 2.5 year old and kind of made a balls of it. Luckily my wife came to the rescue and got his head looking normal again.

So tomorrow we'll head off to the barber shop. I just hope the guy there doesn't try to engage him in some banter, you know like "so, will you be watching the game tonight?" or "how's business?".

He's nearly 5 and would be much more interested in questions like "hey, what about that new star wars lego eh?" or "what are you going to get for your birthday?"

Come to think of it the barber took all his kids at Christmas to lapland to see Santa. Maybe they could talk about that.

Looking forward to seeing how we reacts when he sits in the big old leather chair (probably on that wooden box thing) and your man starts pumping up the chair so he can see himself in the mirror.

Did I mention that iPod is great

I got sent a new MP3 player in the post this week. It's a Samsung T9. It looks nice and I'm going to give it a try. It's part of a project that I signed up for in work as an early adopter.

My initial impressions are not good though.

It was a pain to install. Windows did not recognise it and it does not come with drivers. A gem of thinking there from the people at Redmond who design the Windows Media player I'm afraid.

Then when I got it installed, it uses an interface a bit like iTunes only not as neat and tidy and certainly not as intuitive.

I have the feeling that my iPod bias is going to prevent me from ever truly loving this Samsung device.

I feel like a Mercedes driver being asked to try out a Lexus.

In case of roadworks.. floor it

It's hard to believe but I actually think that the driving on Dublin's M50 motorway is actually getting more dangerous now that the whole thing is a construction site.

They have put a 60km/h (that's about 40 mph) limit in place and have installed those GATSO speed cameras to try and slow people down.

But it's doing no good.

Every day when I drive in to and out from work I see just the craziest most stupid manoeuvres you could imagine. Some weeks back I even saw a car on its roof after the driver must have hit the crash barrier right slap bang in the middle of the roadworks or something.

What speed do you need to be going at to flip over onto your roof like that?

And this morning I noticed someone had taped on some flowers and a wreath to a bent-over post at the side of the motorway, a sure sign that someone had lost their life at that point on the road.

How much madder can this get?

I would love to know what's so wonderful that all these people need to get where they are going so fast and with such little regard for everyone else's safety.

Call me sad but...

I really love the studying. I'm back in the swing of it and am well on the way to getting this penultimate piece of work finished.

It's due for submission at the end of the month but the last 2 weeks of this month are going to be crazy so I'm pushing to get it done well before then.

I also found out that the exam results are going to be released on May 2 so not too far to wait for those either. Typically enough I have forgotten what I wrote and recently have started to reconstruct some memory.. basically I am starting to think "oh no, what if the stuff I wrote in my exam was a load of crap..."

Better not to think too much about these things.

So, back on/in the saddle and progressing well again.

I really am amazed that I like the reading and studying so much. I never thought I would.

It's hard to get back on the saddle

Well with my exams finished (no results for another month I think) I took a few weeks of brain vacation to give myself a break from the intense reading and studying and all that.

But now it's time to get back into the swing of the studying. I have two more pieces of work to complete. I have an assignment due to be handed in at the end of April and then from April to December I will be working on a dissertation.

I have parked the dissertation task for now as I want to get the assignment done and want to give it a good shot.

It's proving hard to get back into studying mode. I don't know why though.

I reckon at this stage that I have handed in large pieces of work, this being the ninth. So I should be able to get going again. But it's proving difficult.

My energy is good. I've caught up on loads of sleep. So why can't I just click back into my groove?

Frustrating. And the clock is ticking.

It's official. Winter is over.

How do I know that Winter is over?

Well I brought my overcoat back upstairs and hung it in the wardrobe. That's how I know. It's my surefire way of knowing that Winter is here when I bring down my overcoat, my gloves and my scarf.

Tonight I came in and saw the tail of the coat hanging down behind all the jackets et cetera so I decided then and there that Winter is over.

You can of course use some other means of determining that Winter is over, such as listening to weather forecasters or looking at animals in a field.

Me. I go by the overcoat rule.

A case of tired fingers?

You've got to love this headline from today's breakingnews.ie website.

Every now and then this website throws up a bizarre headline but then you realise it's probably just some poor unfortunate working late that has hit the wrong key and published a dodgy headline.

They are probably all gone home for the night now so it's probably going to stay like that until the morning. Ah well. Check out the latest breaking news in Entertainment, whatever that is.