My name is Arthur Fhardy, welcome to my yodel party...

The internet is really a bizarre and wonderful place. It's almost scary what you can find there, on just the smallest scraps of a clue. For instance, I was wandering around the office today when a fragment of a song jumped into my head. A song I heard once, a really long time ago.

I used to go to summer camp when I was younger, up in Wisconsin. One summer, there was a tornado warning very close to the camp, so all the campers had to crowd into the main meeting building, which was set into a hillside and was the most protected place on the grounds. So there were these two hundred scared, drenched fourth and fifth graders with their college-aged counselors and a handful of adults, crammed into an auditorium for several hours while the rain poured down and the wind blew the shutters off the windows. For lack of anything better to do, the worship team (this was Timber Lee, a Christian youth camp) tried to keep us extemporaneously entertained, even when the power was flickering and you could barely hear over the noise. We sang every song we'd learned that week, recited the Bible verses from each day, things like that. And when that ran out, I guess they just turned to singing random funny songs that they knew. One of them was a funny one about a yodel party and people with stomachaches. I liked it, but I never really remembered much of it except the chorus, which was yodeling, and the first line "My name is Arthur Fardy, this is my yodel party."

And that crept into my head today at work. On a whim, because I am very bored,I went to Google and typed in "this is my yodel party." And what do you know? I was pleased and amused. A little bit of my childhood, in black and white on the computer.

Sinner on the mainland, he's a sinner on the sea, he looks for absolution, not accountability...

Sometimes it seems you can go for days and days where people talk to you and don't say anything. It's better than not talking at all, I suppose. Sometimes I get the feeling that there is an entire novel happening somewhere very close to me, a deep and moving tale, worthy of being a best seller. I can't see it, though, because I'm one of the characters who turns up three times and is only mentioned in reading comprehension quizzes to see who actually read through the whole book and who just bought the Cliffs Notes. (Did anyone else ever notice that reading the book tended to actually be less useful for remembering minor characters than reading the Cliffs Notes? If I were a teacher, I would find some sneaky way to make use of that fact.)

Like I was saying, I don't really know what I'm saying. Just kind of shouting to the void. That's another interesting thing about the internet, sometimes it shouts back to you, and sometimes you just sit and listen to the echoes of your own keystrokes. I would say I'm bored tonight, but if I did, I would have to start packing. But I think I just admitted it tacitly. So I shall. Or I'll go to bed, or do something.