The Scream Heard Round The World

Ever heard of The Wilhelm Scream?

No doubt you've heard it, unless you've somehow managed to avoid seeing any Hollywood movies made over the past 50 years or so.

One of the other copywriters at work stumbled across this, apparently while researching some movie we were writing a feature on: The history of The Wilhelm Scream.

Great stuff! Also a great name for a band.

I'm so getting a t-shirt.

A Kink in the Coinkydink

Okay, this is just plain spooky.

A while back I heard the Kinks' song "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" on WFMU (probably on the Sunday afternoon slice of zaniness and vintage music nirvana known as the Glen Jones Radio Programme (featuring X-Ray Burns). For some reason I had never heard this song before, at least not to my recollection. It's a great song, and I immediately determined that it would be a fine addition to the Dick Ellis Revival arsenal. A quick search of the P2P universe netted me the Kinks' original, and also revealed versions by The Chocolate Watchband and Camper Van Beethoven. Moving these songs into my iTunes, I also discovered that I already had an MP3 of the song on file, courtesy of my friend Vernam Cipher in Chicago. (So Tom, if I ever get to Chi-Town, here's a song we can jam on.)

So now today, I'm perusing WFMU's "Sites For Sore Eyes" (the oft-linked-to portal to some of the wackiest and wonderfullest www's you'll ever find), and the first entry on the list is this one: exactitudes.

"...an almost scientific, anthropological record of people's attempts to distinguish themselves from others by assuming a group identity. The apparent contradiction between individuality and uniformity is, however, taken to such extremes in their arresting objective-looking photographic viewpoint and stylistic analysis that the artistic aspect clearly dominates the purely documentary element."

Pretty interesting project. I've always been fascinated by that contradiction.

But here's the weird part: At the exact moment that I'm looking at that array of individuality-uniformity, an ad comes on the TV; an IBM ad that I've never seen before, and it features... da da dummm... the Kinks' song "I'm Not Like Everybody Else"!!

I kid you not!

That's not just some coincidence. That's mind-blowing. Like a custom-made soundtrack from the cosmos. Must be a kink in the space-time continuum or something. You can also stir in the fact that Ray Davies played here last Thursday.

What does it all mean?

Can You Please Defenestrate?

I was so angry at myself for forgetting to set my clocks ahead, I defenestrated all the clocks in my apartment, hoping to prove that Time doesn't fly!

(Of course, since I'm at ground level, the effect wasn't as dramatic as I would have hoped.)

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Word of the Day for Sunday April 2, 2006

defenestrate \dee-FEN-uh-strayt\, transitive verb:
To throw out of a window.

Some of his apparent chums . . . would still happily
defenestrate him if they caught him near a window.
-- Andrew Marr, "No option bar the radical one,"
[1]Independent, July 5, 1994

I defenestrated a clock to see if time flies!
-- Lane Smith, "quoted in Who's News," [2]Time for Kids,
September 25, 1998

A woman, driven to fury by the manner in which her lover
prefers to lavish his attention on a match on the telly
rather than her, starts to throw his possessions out of the
window. He's finally moved to stop her when she tries to
defenestrate his new Puma boots.
-- Jim White, "Budgets substantial enough to buy most of
the clubs in the Endsleigh," [3]Independent, April 6, 1996
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Defenestrate is derived from Latin de-, "out of" + fenestra,
"window." The noun form is defenestration.