Take Your Carriage Clock and Shove It

"Hey, Rich, what time is it?"

"It's three-thirty-five." How glib!

If only I could answer that smoothly every time someone asked me the time, right? Right. But whenever I am posed the above question, the following thoughts pop into my head, thus rendering any hope of giving a normal answer useless:

1. Do I tell you the time or do I show you my watch and make you tell the time for yourself?

2. Do I round off the time? Do I say two-thirty instead of two-twenty-eight?

3. Is it "a quarter of four" or "quarter to four?" Or are both understood? Do they even mean the same thing?

4. If we're in class, do I tell you the actual time or just how many minutes of class are left?

There's so much pressure in giving someone the time. I get performance anxiety. I start stuttering like an idiot and eventually give the wrong time and have to correct myself, like an even bigger idiot. I wish everyone would just wear a watch.

On a totally different note, I was reading "The Bob Dylan Albums" by Anthony Varesi in the library today and I was in the chapter on Blonde on Blonde and Varesi mentions that "4th Time Around" is a parody of the Beatles' "Norwegian Wood." I thought about both songs and put the lyrics of the Dylan song to the Beatles' melody in my head and it seemed to fit. I tried it on the guitar when I got home, and fit it did. That's pretty nifty, I guess, but really I don't think it's as hard as it seems. Maybe all songs of the same time signature can be superimposed with each other. I've seen one other example of this. The Rhodes Tavern Troubadors are a DC band with a great guitar player (Dave Chappell--not to be confused with the comedian with a similar name) and they put the lyrics of "Pinball Wizard" to the tune of "Folsom Prison Blues" in their live show. It's a really cool rendition, and in the end they play the Townshend power chords, thus making everyone in the room feel like smashing the place up, in a good way.