All the posts that have been lining up like planes to land over the past week while the airport is down for repairs have turned into a sort of stew. I see bits of them sticking out like a cooked carrot here – my conversation with potential school board recruits or or an onion wedge there – accidentally bumping into a board member while driving around with another board member that he has accused of assault. But honestly, Its hard to reengineer a stew.
I’m up early on Saturday morning but couldn’t really get my laying in bed thoughts moving. But I couldn’t sleep either. Opening the computer I was thinking about song lyrics which I’ve been collecting for the past five or more years to sing to my Mother in lieu of conversation which has been lost to her dementia. Lately I’ve been coming up with more songs to add to the 1,500 or so I’ve put in a three ring binder. The latest one is “My Little Potato” by the music trio Metamora:
You’re my little potato, you’re my little potato,
You’re my little potato, they dug you up,
You come from underground,
I play no instruments and so in the acapella I miss all the funky percussion of the original but Claudia and I trotted it out Thursday morning as our grandsons got ready for school and daycare. I’ve been pulling out the most singable songs to put in a smaller (100 page) three-ring binder of songs to sing to my grandsons. Lately I’ve taken to singing them to sleep like I did my children twenty-five years ago. After they listened to and danced to a choral version of the song we asked them what they thought the potato was. At least it wasn’t as mixed a metaphor as this posts first paragraph.
We have been helping the older boy with his spelling tests of late. I’m a natural because I used to be the pronouncer at regional spelling bees for better than ten years running. Which brings me to the spelling of potato. Its got quite a legacy. In the 1992 election the spelling of the word became a great issue/gaffe in the Presidential campaign. (Ah the innocence of the past) Poor old Dan Quayle, Vice President of the US was made a national laughing stalk when he told a grade school kid in a photo op that he hadn’t put an e at the end of potato like the card the VP had been handed moments before showed. You can read the back story here.
It took out Bush and Quayle in 92 with the same lethality that Ebola had on the Democrats this year.
Darn thing is that you do find the o in potato followed by an e quite often when it becomes plural – potatoes much like heroes and possibly zeroes and smores. Oh wait, forget that last example with the graham crackers, marshmallows and chocolate squares. I’m not sure if the oe thing is British spelling like adding the u in colour or honour. Over the decade quite a few websites have addressed the issue.
OK, that little ramble has gotten my blogging juices flowing. NEXT POST!
