There's an old joke which goes something like this...
I used to hate school. Every morning, my mum would try to wake me up and get me out of bed, and I'd weep and wail and gnash my teeth and sob, "but Mum, I don't want to go - all the kids are horrible to me! They call me names and spit in my lunch and knock me over in the corridor... it's awful!"
And my mum would sit on the edge of my bed and take my hand in hers, offering these gentle words of persuasion, "Look, we've talked about this before, son. You've got to go... you're the teacher!"
It's a cracker, as Frank Carson would say. And such a good joke that the Super Furry Animals turned it into a song...
I didn't really know what to call this week's Top Ten, and I only really settled on "Mythical Creatures" under protest... since clearly everyone knows Bigfoot isn't a myth.
Apologies, all you sceptics, but I'm 100% Fox Mulder: I want to believe. The alternative is a much more boring world.
Anyway, here are ten songs about creatures I'm willing to be convinced are just as real as you or I...
This gentleman is The Weeknd. I can't pretend to be familiar with his work, but I do know that the French don't have a word for him. Here are ten songs that have nothing to do with him...
The King of Pop was Michael Jackson. This is Mick Jackson, who coincidentally wrote Blame It On The Boogie which was then a big hit for his slightly longer namesake.
This is my last week off with Sam (after a few days back in purgatory last week) before the hard slog through till November (when I finally start my new job). So a few more days out have been planned... and a few more middle-aged King Cnut mumbles have been expressed.
Last week I spoke (at length) about how They are slowly trying to phase out real money in favour of digital / card spending, something that C agreed with greatly (pointing us all towards this article which shows that it isn't just middle-aged Cnuts fearing the end of money). Well, here's the latest chapter in that tale of woe... car parks.
A number of city centre car parks I've encnutered over the past few weeks have refused to let me pay for my parking with coins. The machines are taped up with bin bags, forcing us instead to use their parking apps. Occasional signs describe this as a covid measure, while others say nothing, which implies this is the future.
Like a true King Cnut, I refuse to use parking apps. I've tried and the hoops to jump through are just too many. I want to put a few coins in a slot, grab my ticket for the dashboard, and go. If I have to put my registration number into the machine (to stop me sharing a ticket with another driver... remember how nice it was in the good old days when someone offered you their unused parking ticket?), that's about as far as I'll go. But I'm not logging into one of the three dozen possible parking apps and giving them my life story (not to mention bank details) just to leave my car for a couple of hours on a piece of scraggy wasteland. I'll drive on and find another car park, thanks.
But I know my days of doing that are numbered. The faceless oligarchs who own our car parks don't want to pay attendants any more, and they certainly don't want the hassle of sending someone round to empty the ticket machine, count up all the coins, and take them to the bank... not when they can get us to shoot our digital cash straight into their veins. And I'll tell you who I feel sorry for the most. This guy...
Here's ten songs about parking and parking lots. Because song writers prefer to use the Americanism (I couldn't find any car park songs)... probably because most of these guys are Americans (apart from the ones who sing about valet parking - Brits with too much money, obviously!).
I won't spoil your Saturday morning by explaining the connection too graphically, suffice it to say their names all come back to the same point of origin...
