Now, I’m not referring to songs that are clearly intended to be weird and obscure, like “Loser” by Beck and “I Am the Walrus” by the Beatles.  (And I am hoping that having said that, I won’t be assassinated by hordes of ravening Beatles fans with machetes, screaming “It’s not nonsense!  It’s profound!” as they hack me to pieces.)  I’m more referring to songs that are tripping along just fine, and suddenly have a line that makes no sense at all.

To start with a fairly mild example:  how about the famous Jimmy Buffett song, “Margaritaville?”  Now, mind you, it’s not that I object to its central message of drinking and debauchery in the tropics.  It’s more the line in the chorus, “Looking for my lost shaker of salt.”  I mean, come on, Jimmy, I know that (1) margaritas have salt in them, so it sort of makes sense, and (2) there aren’t that many words that rhyme with “fault,” but I still think you could have done better than that.

And, of course, it gets worse.  How about the bouncy little Howard Jones song, “Life in One Day?”  It’s a sweet little tune, with a nice, positive lyric, all about Living In The Now and Being Happy For What You Have.  Then you get to the bridge into the chorus:  “Time will wear away the stone/ Gets the hereditary bone.”

Yeah, okay.  I mean, my only question would be, “what the hell does that mean?”  At first, I thought I had heard it wrong, but those words were confirmed both by my wife and Lyrics.com, so I’m forced to the conclusion that they’re correct.  I have no idea what it means, but I think it sounds illicit, in an oblique sort of way.  In any case, whenever I get to that point in the song, if I’m singing along, I stop, and listen, and think, “Is that really what he’s singing?”  And yes, it is.  Every single time.

Then, there’s one of the first pop songs that was explicitly and unequivocally about sex, Bad Company’s “Feel Like Making Love” (the song that my mom used to refer to as “that filthy song you like.”).  Most of it is pretty, um, straightforward.  Then there’s the line:  “If I had those golden dreams of my yesterday, I would wrap you in the heaven till I’m dying on the way.”  Um, yeah.  That makes total sense.  Maybe the lyric-writer’s testosterone levels had risen so high from not getting laid that it was beginning to interfere with his higher brain function, I dunno.  But as a come-hither line, it seems more baffling than it does enticing.

Now, how about Fleetwood Mac’s “Eyes of the World?”  Another song that has a lot going for it, including one of the catchiest guitar riffs ever written.  But what’s with the line, “Monday’s children are filled with face, Tuesday’s child is full of grace?”  You don’t know?  Neither do I, and neither, I suspect, does Lindsay Buckingham.

Having already pissed off all the Beatles and Fleetwood Mac fans, I hesitate to take on a singer whose fans are even more rabid. I’m speaking, of course, of Neil Diamond.  Most of his songs are smarmy but not weird (although Dave Barry has commented upon “I am, I said/ To no one there/ And no one heard at all, not even the chair” as being one of the most ridiculous lines ever written).  But for my money, the most inexplicable thing he ever sang was the first lines of “Sweet Caroline:”  "Where it began, I can’t begin to know when, but then I know it’s growing strong/ But wasn’t the spring, whooo, and spring became the summer, who'd have believed you'd come along."

Once again, I respond:  Right!  Sure!  What?

Of course, singers have other ways to screw up perfectly good songs than by inserting lines that make no sense; they can insert lines that aren’t even made of actual words.  One example, which I hate to mention because it’s kind of a stupid song to begin with, is “How Do You Do” by Mouth & MacNeal.  In this song, they seem periodically to run out of words, so they just insert the musical equivalent of “um:”  “How do you do, mm-hmm, I thought, wa-na-na-na-na-na/ Just me and you, and then we can na-na-na-na, Just like before, and you will think na-na-na-na/ Hey, that’s what I’m living for.”

And somewhat along the same lines, there’s the song by Sting, “Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic” – which is a kind of cool lyric, at least until he starts braying “EEE-OHHH,” at which point he sounds like an insistent, and strangely musical, donkey.

Now, understand that it’s not that I dislike any of these songs, or singers, with the possible exception of Neil Diamond, who is sort of mandatory to dislike if you have a Y chromosome.  It’s more that it ticks me off that they couldn’t just see fit to write a whole lyric without lapsing into a line or two of bizarre nonsense.  It bothers me most when I’m singing along to the radio, and then the line comes up, and I feel like an idiot singing it, but I just know that the band is depending upon my vocal support, so I can’t just drop out.  It’s a quandary.  Usually what I do is to go ahead and sing it, but with this kind of sheepish expression, as if to say, “Hey, I didn’t write this.  I’m just singing it.”

Except for “Gets the hereditary bone.”  I’m reluctant even to say that in public, much less sing it.

Regular readers of this blog may remember that about a year ago, a student of mine attempted to kill me by sending me a video clip of an apparently pathologically stupid woman attempting to defend the practice of homeopathy.  This student, who by all appearances is a moral and upstanding young man, nevertheless induced me to watch something which he knew might well have the effect of making me choke on my own outrage and die in horrible agony.

Needless to say, I survived the first murder attempt.  Not satisfied with failure, however, this same student has tried again, this time sending me a link to a website called “Truthism.com.”

I must say that as murder attempts go, this one was pretty inspired.  The homeopathy clip was only about eight minutes long, while this website took a half-hour to read thoroughly – thirty minutes of my life that I will never again get back, and a half-hour during which I made many muffled snorting noises, rather like a bulldog with a sinus blockage.  In case you’re understandably reluctant to waste that amount of time, or possibly risk dying of Exploding Brain Syndrome, I present below a summary of the gist of the Truthism website.

1)  Everything on this website is true.

2)  If you doubt anything on this website, you are at best asleep, and at worst a mindless sheep who is being led about by evil government disinformation specialists.

3)  Many things which turned out to be true were disbelieved, even laughed at, at first.  Therefore if you disbelieve and laugh at this website, it must be true.

4)  You do not have access to government Top Secret facilities and records.  Therefore, anything this website claims is in those facilities and records must be true, because you can’t disprove it.

5)  Science is just another means for the ruling elite to control the populace.

6)  The ruling elite also invented religion and morality as a way to control the populace.  The fact that science and religion are often in conflict is an indication that they are both wrong.

7)  The current ruling elite are the same individuals who created the Egyptian and Mayan pyramids, Stonehenge, and the Nazca lines.

8)  These individuals, for good measure, also created humanity itself.

9)  Because the ruling elite aren’t actually people, but are super-intelligent reptiles from another planet.

10)  Called “Annunaki.”

11)  Did I mention that everything in this website is true?

12)  The fact that many ancient cultures depicted snakes in their art is proof that the earth is being ruled by reptiles from outer space.

13)  The caduceus, the symbol of medical science, is a pair of snakes coiled together.  It looks a little like a DNA molecule, which is the repository of all the genetic information in the cell.

14)  There you are, then.

15)  If that doesn’t prove it to you, then consider the following chain of logic:  Crop Circles, Area 51, Ancient Astronauts, the Face on Mars, Freemasons, the Hollow Earth Theory!

16)  Ha.  That sure showed YOU.

17)  And as a last piece of evidence; everything on this website is true.

I have to point out, at this juncture, how much it COST me to write all this out for you.  I can hear the pathetic little death screams of the neurons in my frontal cortex as I’m writing this.  But being the selfless reporter that I am, on the front lines of investigation, I’m willing to undergo significant risks to my own health, safety, and IQ in order to bring this story to your doorstep.

And you know, it’s not as if I can’t see the attractiveness of this as a theory.  Think how positing the existence of evil, super-powerful cold-blooded reptilian alien propaganda specialists would explain, for example, Ann Coulter.  But alas, it’s not enough simply to like a theory, it has to fit with the data, and at the moment, the lion’s share of the evidence is in the “against” column.  So, sad to say, we must conclude that despite the website’s repeated claims of being true, its domain name should probably be changed to “EgregiousBullshitism.com.”

And with that said, I think I should go lie down for a while and recover from this latest assassination attempt.  If this keeps happening, I may have to hire a bodyguard.