janeowit's Journal: Finally a Folk Song About Ikea!

I think I found a musician that writes lyrics even Some Woman will find hard to ignore.

Jonathan Coulton, the contributing troubadour for Popular Science magazine, rocks my socks off... and writes songs that show off an incredible sense of humor and intelligence. Music hasn't been this fun and educational since They Might Be Giants.

To prove my point...

I give you Exhibit A, the hilariously catchy "Ikea".
(Billy the bookcase says hello
And so does a table whose name is Ingo!)

Exhibit B, the hopefully mathematically, and otherwise, correct "Mandelbrot Set".
(Mandelbrot's in heaven, at least he will be when he's dead.
Right now he's still alive and teaching math at Yale...
Just take a point called Z in the complex plane
Let Z1 be Z squared plus C
And Z2 is Z1 squared plus C
And Z3 is Z2 squared plus C and so on
If the series of Zs should always stay
Close to Z and never trend away
That point is in the Mandelbrot Set)

And last, but, certainly not least, the "Flickr Song" that beautifully narrates this video. I don't know which part made me laugh the most; "Dwyer's rocking out on air guitar" or "as it turns out, the eyepatch is A-OK!"

I think I'm in love.

[Some Woman]

Anybody who rhymes "god named Thor" with "furniture store" is a friend of mine.

One complaint...

[Some Woman]

Needs more tealights.

Re:

[janeowit]

But he mentions that he bought candles!

I, too, am in love. Too bad the closest he's coming here is four-hours-away Plover, WI. Who goes to Plover?

congratulations

[rdewald]

You sold some music for this guy. Thanks for pointing me to it.

I just watched Flickr Song.

[Some Woman]

That was awesome.

Re:

[janeowit]

I know- this guy is a genius! The more songs I hear the more I like him.

If you want to hear more, I recommend the surprisingly sweet and factual biographical piece,"A Talk With George" [jonathancoulton.com],
a song that was actually featured on Slashdot, "Code Monkey" [jonathancoulton.com],
or learn about a subject matter I actually know something about, genetics, in "That Spells DNA" [jonathancoulton.com].

I think Ikea is still my favorite, but it's getting harder and harder to decide.

Re:

[janeowit]

I know, all the cool kids moved to a shiny new lunch-table and I'm still sitting at the old sticky one. I'm not so much a curmudgeon as that I'm lazy...

But not everyone decided to leave, and I've been posting and reading infrequently enough for it not to seem too lonely here.
Maybe I'll actually have to think about switching. Is it worth the minimal effort I'll have to put in? I can only imagine it's one non-stop party of multimedia journals.

Brilliant!

[bettiwettiwoo]

Absolutely brilliant. The only trouble is that it's bloody hard to stop laughing!

Wrong!

[bettiwettiwoo]

Actually, I was wrong: the only trouble isn't that it's bloody hard to stop laughing, it's that it seems impossible to get the IKEA song out of my head.

Re:

[janeowit]

I know- that's when I heard it I had to share it.

P.S. My Billy the bookcase says hello, but my table and chairs don't (they are embarrassed their name is Jokkmokk).

Re:

[bettiwettiwoo]

My Billy bookshelves waves hello back, together with the Benno CD shelves, the Göteborg sofa (which they don't have any more) and a desk and two chairs the name of which I no longer remember.

I guess Jokkmokk sounds a bit to an English native speaker?! Come to think of it, it is semi-naff in Swedish also, but the town Jokkmokk, rather far up in the north, is quite cute.

Ingo in the song is the nickname of the only Swedish world champion in heavy weight boxing, Ingemar Johansson. [wikipedia.org]