...born with the gift of laughter and a sense that the world was mad

Show tune: I spend a most pleasant Sunday in Stratford yesterday, where I caught one of my favourite musicals, The Music Man. During my misspent adololence, I committed its lyrics to memory, and can still do a creditable version of "Trouble"--travelling salesman/spellbinding bamboozler Harold Hill's mezmering spiel to the cranky folks of River City, the one that convinces them that forking over fistfulls of dollars for a boy's band is the only way to protect their vulnerable "youths" from the trumped up threat of the pool hall ("with a capital T and that rhymes with P and that stands for pool"); the spiel seems somewhat less impressive these days, when practically every rapper can riff like a Hill. Anyway, on the ride home, I had time to revise the show's rousing Sousa-esque march, "76 Trombones":

Seventy-six thought cops in the HRC

With a hundred and eight (give or take) kangaroos.

There were more than a thousand gripes

Made by folks of diff’rent stripes

Who complained their “rights” had been abused.

Seventy-six thought cops caught the Nazi creeps

While a hundred and eight kangaroos shut them down.

And a vigilant honouree of the nervous CJC

Made some bucks and garnered great renown.

There were coppers poking into bloggers’ bloggery.

Blundering, blundering, finding nothing "nice".

Double, triple jeopardy does not pertain

Cops explain

You’ll be “tried” twice or thrice.

There were plenty of high horses in the HRC

Galloping, galloping, apprehending “hate”.

‘Slamists who want “blasphemy”

To be consigned to history

And Jews who, so clueless, think that’s great!

Posted by: scaramouche at 10:02 | link | comments

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