Friday, May 5, 2006

Exam week procrastination sites Cinco de Mayo and singing about a billion bloggers While trying to track down the lyrics to a 15-year-old song in celebration of Cinco de Mayo (and a student landing a job at MundoHispano), I stumbled on a more recent ballad... on the topic of fighting consolidation of media ownership. While not the most "sing a song of..." topic, that does make it appropriate for my "other journalism" category as well as my more music-focused blog...  Here it is: "The Tower," by the Austin Lounge Lizards, complete with cartoon video courtesy of Consumer Union's Hearusnow.org (For my Web Publishing students in the audience, notice how the site very thoughtfully provides TEN different links to various format versions of the cartoon, a separate link if you just want to download an audio MP3 of the song,  and even a PDF file of the lyrics... presumably in case you want to sing along, as if you had the car radio tuned in to the "Wrinkled Hippie 96" or "Anguished Artist 103" FM mentioned in the song.) Hmmm... The lyric does have a reference to "a billion bloggers," so maybe Instapundit or Scripting News, Rocketboom, Jay Rosen, J's Scratchpad, or some other high-traffic blogger will link to the site after reading about it here... if they haven't already. While still timely, judging by the date in the PDF file, the site has been around for six months or more. Which gets me back to this note's main theme: Procrastination. That little video says it all, so thanks to Rocketboom for pointing to it today.   Oddly enough, the song I was looking for -- for Cinco de Mayo -- turned out not to be by the Austin Lounge Lizards at all, but by another Lone Star State band with an alliterative name,  the Texas Tornados. Alas, they are no longer together, but they still sound great on record... especially if you appreciate painful macaronic rhymes like, "If you've got the dinero, I've got the Camaro." 6:46:10 PM

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