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the reincarnation of Clarence the cat
Thursday, September 12 2002
Since watching the final installment of American Idol, when that white girl Kelly Clarkson was elected to her term as celebrity pop star, Gretchen and I have been making occasional fun of her first single, "A Moment Like This." It's a hollow shell of a song, little more than a musical placeholder. It had to be written as generically as possible since anyone (okay, not just anyone) could have been elected American Idol and then had, as the first business of their administration, the singing of this dreadful song. As Gretchen pointed out, it sounds exactly like an advertising jingle, and not an especially memorable one either. Still, I'm sure the producers of American Idol did their homework, and they can be sure they'll sell hundreds of thousands of copies to people whose taste I won't even try to comprehend. I myself have downloaded it using KaZaA so I can more effectively marvel at its emptiness. For Gretchen and me, foremost in our minds is a question about the one concrete thing mentioned in this song. What exactly is "that one special kiss"? Might this be a reference to the most special kiss of all?
"A Moment Like This"
(the first hit single from American Idol #1, Kelly Clarkson)
What if I told you
it was all meant to be
would you believe me
would you agree
it's almost that feelin'
that we've met before
so tell me that you don't think I'm crazy
when I tell you love has come here and now
[CHORUS]
A moment like this
Some people wait a lifetime
for a moment like this
some people search forever
for that one special kiss
Oh, I can't believe it's happening to me
some people wait a lifetime
for a moment like this
[Verse 2]
Everything Changes
but beauty remains
something so tender
I can't explain
well I may be dreamin'
but still lie awake
can we make this dream last forever
and I'll cherish all the love we share
[REPEAT CHORUS]
[BRIDGE]
could this be the reign of love above
I wanna know that you will catch me when I fall
so let me tell you this
some people wait a lifetime
for a moment like this
[ENDING CHORUS]
Some people spend two lifetimes
for a moment like this
some people search forever
for that one special kiss
oh I can't believe it's happening to me
some people wait a lifetime
for a moment
like this
Oh, like this
some people search forever oh yeah
some people wait a lifetime
for a moment
like this.
For reasons that should be obvious to anyone unimpressed with market-tested teen pop and the ongoing metastasizing of Starbucks, I've been trying to get Gretchen to use Mozilla 1.1 instead of Internet Explorer. At first she was agreeable, even enthusiastic, but then one day I noticed she was backsliding. It turns out that there are obscure features in IE that she knows and uses, features I didn't even know existed. Everything had been fine before I upgraded her from Mozilla 1.0 to 1.1. Something about the upgrade made it impossible to modify the "User Toolbar" - which has a drag and drop bookmark service similar to one present in the Google toolbar on IE. So I did some research and experimentation, tracking down a Google toolbar for Mozilla and then somehow fixing the problem with drag and drop links on the User Toolbar. This seemed to satisfy Gretchen, and she's back to using Mozilla once more. For all you people who are still using Internet Explorer on your computer, I urge you to switch to Mozilla today. The installation takes about a minute once the download arrives and it doesn't require a reboot. Once installed, Mozilla is fast, stable, and it continues to be improved by an army of dedicated open source coders. Meanwhile IE languishes, fat, dumb and lazy after having won the browser wars. One feature alone should induce you to make the switch: the ability to turn off unrequested windows (aka pop-ups). Thanks to Mozilla, the web is back to being fun, fast, and useful again.
Yesterday and today, I've been listening to Sepultura's Arise, a classic album from the crossroads of speed and death metal. It's an excellent soundtrack for the way I feel about the anniversary September 11th. My favorite song on the album is "Altered State," mostly because of the lyrics of a single line, "No one knows the neighbors." According to the liner notes the lyrics actually read, "No one knows the nameless," but I think my version, which I've "heard" in the song since Josh Furr first introduced me to Sepultura in 1991, is far more compelling.
When I was walking Sally in the Vale of Cashmere late this afternoon, I came upon what I take to be an extremely rare sight: a mutant robin with large tracts of pure white feathers all over its back and neck. It was clearly a robin because it had a red breast and was in a flock with other robins. According to this page, such partial-albino robins do appear in nature occasionally. Evidently a completely albino robin is at too great of a survival disadvantage to persist for long.
In the evening I met Gretchen down at Amin's, the new Indian restaurant near the corner of Union Street and Seventh Avenue here in Park Slope, Brooklyn. We got to talking about the next cat we plan to get once we move into our huge new house in Hurley. We've already decided to get a tiny black male kitten and to name him Clarence (perhaps in honor of my late maternal grandfather). Since Clarence will be a newborn kitten once we move to Hurley, he hasn't even been born yet. He may not yet even be a twinkle in his unneutered parents' eyes. This got us to speculating about what Clarence is doing right now in the life he has before dying and being reincarnated as a cat. It seemed like an appropriate conversation, given that we were eating in an Indian restaurant. Neither Gretchen nor I actually believe in past lives, of course. But we do believe in the cuteness of little black kittens. If we were moving to Hurley today, the cat we'd adopt would be an irresistible blue-eyed monster named Batman. [Batman seems to have disappeared from Petfinder, so I assume he's already been adopted.]
As it had been the time before, the food at Amin's was good, but it lacked the brow-sweating bite one normally expects of Indian food.
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