Really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree

The other day I was driving along, listening to a classic rock station on the radio. The Joker, by Steve Miller was playing. I was about to click it off (I’ve never been particularly fond of the song), but before I could do so, this familiar line caught my ear:

"Some people call me the space cowboy…Yeah! Some call me the gangster of love…Some people call me Maurice…Cause I speak of the Pompatus of love."

Pomatus? I hadn’t thought about that word in years. I am old enough to remember when The Joker first hit the airwaves. It was 1973. In fact, I was old enough then to really care about music. Steve Miller wasn’t a musician from my parent’s generation. Glenn Miller was! Steve Miller was on the bandstand of my ge-ge-neration!

Pomatus? Well, frankly, when I first heard the song, I didn’t know what the word meant. And being fifteen, I guess I was a bit too self-conscious about my vocabulary to ask someone. So I let it go. Quickly, I grew tired of the song and stopped caring that I didn’t know.

Fast forward to 2006. It struck me listening to The Joker again that I still didn’t know the meaning of a pompatus of love. How ridiculous was that? I went home that night and did a search on the internet. Turns out the word doesn’t exist in any legitimate dictionary. Steve Miller made it up, based loosely on an R&B song from the 1950s. It’s kind of an interesting story. There’s a good write-up about it here.

More interesting to me, though, is that I could wait 33 years before I cared enough to look this up. Thirty-three years! You’d think I’d be pissed off after all that time, that I’d been duped into believing a word was real when it wasn’t, a word made up by an artist I never really cared for. But I’m not. The sum total of my reaction was: “Huh, interesting, well, I wonder what the weather is supposed to be tomorrow…better head over to weather.com.”

Here’s the best part. In another 33 years I’ll be old and senile. I’ll probably forget that I ever looked up the meaning of pompatus. So I’ll do another search. And buried in those search results will be a link to this story – that I wrote! Won’t I be surprised.

Beta bits

I just switched over to Blogger beta. It was one of those impulse things. I was signing on to my regular Blogger account when this pop-up box appeared asking if I wanted to try out the new Blogger in partnership with Google. I had no idea that Google bought Blogger. No matter, the pop-up box said there were lots of new features at my disposal with Blogger beta, so I said yes.

What the hell was I thinking? I don’t need new features. I need to stay away from new features. New features are bad. New features will steal your time and suck the life force out of your body, turn you into Kevin Costner.

People have been technology-challenged since the VCR. And yet we keep buying more stuff, trying to keep up with the times: DVD players (now with Blu-ray), computers with wireless home networks, surround sound systems, digital music players. Face it, we don’t understand any of this stuff beyond the bare bones knucklehead features. On/off? Yeah, sure we can handle that. Set time? Probably, but the daylight saving component is iffy. Choose your digital music format buffering level? Uhh, yeah, right.

There is no way that I am going to use any of the new features I just signed up for at Blogger beta, and yet I just couldn’t bring myself to say no. Have you seen those new Jessica Simpson ads for Directv where she plays a dumb but extremely hot blonde waiting tables at a bar? In one of the ads, Jessica-of-the-impossibly-short-short-shorts asks her audience if they wouldn’t rather be checking her out in high definition 1080i. Her punchline, delivered in a perfect southern belle drawl, is brilliant: “I totally don't know what that means, but I want it.” (Those last two words pronounced “woe nit.”) Yeah, Jessica, I can relate. My new drag-and-click template editing capability at Blogger beta? Don’t have a clue how it works, what purpose it serves, or even if I can figure out how to use it, but I totally woe nit.

Oh, I do love a good tagline

Like this one from the cover of the November 2006 Smithsonian magazine...

From Beloved to Beheaded: The Real Marie Antoinette

(You've got to admit it has a certain edge to it.)