For five seconds every day or so, I've been wondering about the Rama Lama song that Crumbler blogged about recently. The songwriter died. But, so, was Rama Lama the real name of the Who Put the Bomp song?

No, I learned, and YouTube helped. Bomp was referencing Rama Lama — and Blue Moon, which I knew and had figured was an intro to making the rest up. As I said, the 'Tube helped with: the arthouse version, the cereal-and-milk version, the treehouse version, the Lego version, the solo cereal-and-milk version, the SpongeBob version, the original version, the girl cereal-and-milk version, the Spanish version, the Muppet version (sung by rams and lambs), the Slipknot version, the Rocky Sharpe version, the foreign dance class version, and I give up.

In other news, the bird is word.

One of my favorite movie song clips, from Young at Heart, which I'm not sure if I've seen all the way. The piano+vocal studio rarity is also nice.

Here, via @tysone. Apparently I worked at some kind of newspaper.

EVANSTON AFTER MIDNIGHT
Not at The Daily Northwestern newsroom. Unlike what most people think, … online editor Patrick Cooper goes home and continues fine-tuning the Web page on  …

Cooper conspires to deny fries
Patrick Cooper, who friends describe as "a fat tub of lard'", … The slight occurred in the offices of The Daily Northwestern, where Winegar was at a …

We caught the first day of Austin City Limits Festival to close the trip last week. We had a great time but I left with the goal of figuring out any zoom on my phone, which we know is otherwise one of the best cheap picture-taking cellphones. Got sky? It had me covered. But.

My favorite band of the day was the first one we saw, the Strange Boys. Strokes meets Mersey Beat meets Dylan meets Frogman Henry.

Or as the Austin Chronicle put it, in an ACL quick take: "Strange Boys vocalist Ryan Sambol looks and sounds like a little boy. The slurred squeak of his voice bleats unique and quite frankly endearing, and its seeming innocence, along with the local quartet's youthful looks and thin, noisy sound, invites comparison to another young garage rock band, Black Lips. The Strange Boys don't possess the Lips' anarchic punk energy, substituting instead an unconcerned ennui that seems rooted in lazy front-porch blues."

Listen on their MySpace page. It doesn't have their awesome live cover of James Brown's Think, but you can probably get the same feeling I did — you'd like to have them playing in your car, now.

I wondered how Jakob Dylan would sound at ACL when I heard he got no love in Denver. He turned out to sound pretty much like himself but working very hard to stay low key, singing his soft "mountain" music with his new band. That interpretation could have been wrong. Maybe those Wallflowers had made him work very hard to stay louder.

It may have been overly harsh initially to see the set and tunes were a vanity project. But the revival of Three Marlenas was more enjoyable than the rest. I did feel sorry for him some with the shadow of his dad. All Jakob did was put on a hat and sunglasses and play in a band with a guy with big hair,  and all I could think was, "A hat? Sunglasses? Big hair? Really? Hasn't Bob kinda done that?" I'd never leave the house.

After catching some of the wackiness of Gogol Bordello (Wikipedia: "Phill Jupitus has once described the band as 'a bit like The Clash and The Pogues having a fight … in Eastern Europe,' while Kenneth Partridge of the Hartford Courant described lead singer Eugene Hütz's voice as 'somewhere between that of Borat and Triumph the Insult Comic Dog' "), Mates of State didn't do much for me. Sorry. Crowd position may have affected things. But after trading txts most of the day, finally met up with Sazerac and her Louisiana friends there.

First time seeing Jenny Lewis. Missed David Byrne to see her. I heard Byrne was great, but Lewis was just my speed in a Work Out Fine way.

(Aside: Awesomely ridiculous live Tina performance of the song here: part one, part two. YouTube also has a Springsteen take — Bottom Line boots are historic, never great sounding but the shaggy dogs make up for it, here in "Skeevotz Manniello gets married" form – and quickly returning to the land of the awesome ridiculous, a cover by The Matadors, "one of the finest R&B bands ever to emerge from Eastern Europe," according to one source. You make the call. Please.)

Lewis ACL '08 on YouTube: Carpetbagger, See Fernando, Jack Killed Mom.

Gonzaga note: Carpetbagger feats. Lewis boyfriend Johnathan Rice '01. 

The day ended with parts of Alejandro Escovedo, Mars Volta and Manu Chao, whom we only heard by accident but sadly was not playing King of the Bongo when we did. Thanks to Joel and Lou, who know how to have a good time at these things, and my best to Heineken keg cans, Zilker Park dirt, SPF 70 sunscreen, and pulled-pork sandwiches.

Stumbled from a friend's IM profile link to The Atlantic's homepage to this great piece: "Casanova’s first orgasm, Hitler’s famous mustache, Bob Hope’s last jokes: for every thing, there is a season. Herewith a compilation of great moments in precocity, endurance, and procrastination, organized instructively by age."

At 28, Tennessee Williams takes his state name.

At 70, we get our Frost. "Robert Frost gets the young Truman Capote fired from his job at The New Yorker after he walks out of one of Frost’s poetry readings, 1944." Google Books helps with Capote interviews.

B: You said Robert Frost was the meanest man you ever met. Could you give me an example of how he was mean to you?

C: When I was about eighteen years old there was a thing called the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. I was invited up there and the great mogul of the thing was Robert Frost. You know, a glob of all these old Midwestern ladies and librarians and what not, oohing and ahhing and carrying on — he was such a ham. Anyway, one rainy day I stepped into this sort of barn — he was in this barn escaping from the rain — and the two of us had a little conversation. And I think he thought that I wasn't particularly awed by Mr. Frost, or something. Anyway, the chemistry was not particularly good. But the next day he had a poetry reading and I had the flu and I said I wasn't going to come. The director of the conference said to me that Mr. Frost was furious and thought I was insulting him. And so I said: "Well, I'll come but I've really got this fever." So I went, and about half way through the thing I felt so badly I thought I was going to faint, because it was terribly hot. So I got up and tried to ease along this aisle to go out the door. And Frost picked up this book and he threw it at me as hard as he could. And [chuckles] shouted, I don't know, something. And he refused to go on with the reading. And I went back to my room and the director of the conference came and asked me would I leave immediately because Mr. Frost was so upset about it. And with the flu and a fever of 103 I had to leave there. And then Robert Frost wrote a letter to The New Yorker Magazine and got lots of other people at the conference to write, saying how insulting I had been, as though I were representing The New Yorker. The New Yorker had nothing to do with it, you know, except that I worked there.

B: Did he hit you with the book?

C: Yep.

Frost!

Various Arlington friends got my crazy rainbow storm photo mail on Monday, and I should probably explain. The rainbow was ending in the next block – don't give me your light refraction theories, I know it was — and right behind it, a rainstorm had begun swallowing Rosslyn. The storm was heading up Wilson Boulevard, and I felt like I was the early warning system. Part lighthouse keeper, part random.

The week has been more scattered than any one in recent memory, with days of eight meetings and nights of three hours, and if I haven't replied to your message, you're in with the in crowd on that one.

But the week has been full of awesome links that I'm never going to be able to write about individually as much as I want to. Reality at 6:30 a.m. Friday. So, I'm just going to give you the joy and walk away.

First, Monica sends an essay of love for stand-up desks. While my experiment there has ended, lost at the time of the conventions but also maybe due to Olympic inspiration disappearing, I salute those who make it beyond two weeks. Then the Morning News gives "Homer Simpson Alone in the World." The work is the greatest art that will ever happen with a Homer figure and a camera. I may feel most like this pic.

Next, Jess e-mails the Serious Eats piece on a hamburger that has two grilled cheese sandwiches for a bun. Not only is the idea of "very thin bread" new to me, but clearly this is a project for the cafeteria. Jeff, meanwhile, semds the latest in matchmaking techniques and suggests I should charge for my profile-writing services. Not a bad idea. I don't know what I think of the paid Macy's wingmen.

Last, before I race to work, the New Yorker — where I'm many issues behind but two got done heading to and from Austin — gives us "The Gate of Horn." Love the poem. It pushes me to take those comp days.

"Forgive me if I seem a bit at sea / but you woke me from a dream of words / I was setting to music I’ll want you / to transcribe for me …"

Probably because I'm getting faster on cell photos. (But not better.) 

Above, the plate is "ON THE." For a period of several hours between taking the picture and looking at it again, I thought the plate was "IN THE," which would make sense. If you're wondering what the sticker on the left is, you're not alone. But even if you know, "Human rights on the USA" doesn't work, and neither does "Human rights campaign on the USA" or "Human rights on the flag." In every case, "IN THE" makes more sense. Maybe this is a job for Plate Show.

Below, we have an Audi spotted this morning. Plate: "AUOOOODI."

With yesterday's vegetable egg roll lunch from the office cafeteria. "Today, some new connections will be very exciting indeed."

We take our cue from Monday's Reliable Source.

A CBC bash sponsored by Verizon on Friday packed Love nightclub with executive types in cocktail wear grooving to the sounds of LL Cool J. When the rapper segued into his '96 hit Doin' It, he invited the ladies to join him onstage — and got swarmed by female fans, some getting so up-close-and-personal the superstar practically blushed. "I'm nice, but I'm not that nice," he said. "I thought this was a corporate event!"

I represent Queens, she was raised out in Brooklyn, and you know you loved the song. This blog makes some attempt to be appropriate for all ages, but when it fails, the music is good. And while Doin' It remains on the chart as only the 61st most popular song of '96 (Billboard Hot 100), it's the song you want to hear right now.

Note: This blog is susceptible to most of the Hot 100 of 1996. Not even going to list the songs. There are too many, and they are too dangerous.

… or Depression-era 5th grade essay? You make the call.

The docks and ships were falling apart. The fish like to stay around the old piling and sunken ships. We fished for a while but caught nothing. Then I wandered around into different spots. Finally I dropped my line right into a school of perch. I called my father and he came running. … Of course my father caught the most. In the excitement the lunch blew into the river, as we had just about started to eat when I found the school of fish. The sea gulls happened to be very plentiful at this point. Soon they ate the lunch, we ate the fish and everybody was happy.

Find out.