these tears I can't hold inside....

Earworms of the Week

“Don’t Panic” – Coldplay

“We live in a beautiful world. Yeah we do”
After the somewhat traumatic events of the last 24 hours, keep repeating this refrain to yourself until you believe it. It’s not really working for me at the moment, to be honest. I keep wondering how we can live through 5 years of David Cameron and his cronies in government, and then somehow we return them again with an outright majority. It’s baffling. I suppose I should be grateful that UKIP only returned a single MP, but when they polled 12.6% of the national vote and only got something like 0.15% of the available seats Meanwhile, the SNP get 8.5% of the seats from 5% of the votes (and almost all the Scottish seats with barely 50% of the vote). Meanwhile, the Lib Dems get almost entirely wiped out with roughly twice the share of the National vote (7.9%), and the Greens get a million votes (3.8% of those cast) and one seat. It doesn’t take a genius to work out that something needs to change, does it? And you know what: with an outright majority in Parliament, the Conservatives don’t need to do a damn thing about it.

Don’t Panic? Probably not, but It might be time to get more directly involved.  I think I'll volunteer to help any pro-Europe campaign for the referendum. I might even be on Ken Clarke's side for that one!

“Strangers in the Night” – Frank Sinatra

Dooby-dooby doo, etc.  Man, I'd been clean of this one for months too.  I blame David Cameron.

“Supremacy” – Muse

Amidst the chaos of the day, this guitar riff popped into my head. How can everything be lost if something like that can happen?

“Everything in its Right Place” – Radiohead
“Bullet in the Head” – Rage Against the Machine

If you remember, our regular Friday quiz at work always has the same questions, but we draw a different letter of the alphabet. Today we drew “R”. So when I was racking my brains to think of a famous band/artist beginning with the letter “R”, how is it that, no matter how hard I mentally scrolled through my iPod, I drew a blank. I could have had the Ramones, the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, the Raconteurs, the Rolling Stones, R.E.M., Radiohead, Rage Against the Machine, or something like that…. But no, the only thing I could dredge up was Leann Rimes. WHO DOES NOT FEATURE ON MY IPOD. Go figure. Although, on the upside, 2 points as no one else thought of her either.

“Gleaming Auction” – Snow Patrol

There was a time in 2004 when this was the best album ever and I saw the band 4 times in all that year. But you know how it goes, as a band becomes popular and you start to hear them everywhere, you slowly go off them? II was a bit like that with Snow Patrol. Their next album was also good, but something had changed between us; something that was probably cemented by the ubiquity of “Chasing Cars”. It wasn’t them, it was me… but I started to feel slightly embarrassed about liking them. I still bought their albums, but it wasn’t the same (and the quality did start to drop off too). But for some reason, I was inspired to put this album on, and it sounded GREAT. Gary Lightbody does do a lot of talking heads programmes about “Game of Thrones” though, doesn’t he? I know he made a brief appearance as a minstrel, but shouldn’t he be making music or something and not saying how shocked he was by The Red Wedding on Sky Atlantic?

“The Rose” – Bette Midler

It’s on the choir songlist for the summer season, but I think the main reason that it’s in my head is that we’ve been given the results of our colleague feedback survey at work, and we’ve been asked to plot out our action plans on a template that’s been made out in the shape of a tree: plant your seeds of the things you’ve identified you need to focus on, and then build up the leaves of action, check-in and goal…. Ugh. Can you imagine? It’s like an episode of Play School where we all pretend to be a seed and then slowly unfurl ourselves into a tree. But what does Bette teach us? Well, just remember in the winter, far beneath the bitter snows, lies the seed that with the sun's love, in the spring becomes the rose.
Hmm. Beautiful.

“I Heard it Through the Grapevine” – Marvin Gaye
“Brick House” – The Commodores

Last weekend, I just wanted some Marvin and nothing was going to get in my way. Apart from when I wanted to listen to some classic Commodores. How ever did we manage before the instant gratification of downloads? Let’s get it on now, baby….

Have a good weekend, y’all. Just try not to think about it.