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September 19, 2003

Buckle up (and close mouth) for safety

This is an otherwise ordinary cautionary tale of driving hazards, but made amusing only by the musical factor:

A Winston [Ore.] man told police he crashed his car after a bee flew into his mouth while he was singing along with Justin Timberlake’s song Rock Your Body on the radio.

Douglas County Sheriff’s spokeswoman Pam Frank said John L. Nunes, 19, was trying to get rid of the bee or yellowjacket when his car hit a tree.

Okay, I’m pretty much indifferent to Mr. Timberlake’s music—I’ll groove to it if it happens to be playing, however I don’t actively seek it out—but I’ll just say this to the hapless victim: dude, you didn’t have to tell the truth about what song you were singing, you know. (It’s not like there’s a black box in the car, recording your driver’s-seat song stylings. Hm, if there were, I think we’d all be more responsible in our automotive karaoke behavior.) Heh.

I kid, of course. Hopefully, he’s doing okay. And has learned his lesson: singing said artist’s music—okay, any singing so spirited so as to invite a bee to fly into one’s mouth—is best done not while operating a motor vehicle.

Withering weather

Hurricane Isabel has come and gone, and Thom and I are okay.

Last night while we listened to the winds gusting through the trees, I, not one to let an opportunity for superfluous literary allusion go unseized, recalled the following bit of Shakespeare—not verbatim, alas; in fact at the time I only remembered the first line—from appropriately enough, The Tempest:

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices
That, if I then had wak’d after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open and show riches
Ready to drop upon me, that, when I wak’d,
I cried to dream again. (III.ii)

Mmm. (Okay, so maybe Isabel was a bit less delightful.) And then Thom suggested we listen to Holst’s The Planets or Mussorgsky’s Night on Bald Mountain. I added some Orff, namely Carmina Burana, to the hypothetical storm-soundtrack. Yeah, we’re nerds.