Short people live in the future, so the Babies! are very advanced... and other thoughts I just had now. (Awesome Covers Of Already Awesome Songs)

Just so you know, not everything in my life revolves around the song "Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk" by The New Pornographers, although you could be forgiven for thinking that because I mentioned the song not that long ago, and I actually listen to this song a lot, even though listening to it is hard to do because I haven't yet bought the album, so I have to go to Youtube and play the video for it, which I do quite frequently, making me happy that I live in the era of smartphones so that I can, while driving home, look up "Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk" on Youtube and play the video, listening to it on my headphones.

Keep that in mind: It's illegal to text while driving, but not illegal to look up New Pornographers' videos while driving.

Along the way, I found an alternate version of Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk, a cover version of it by The New Pornographers themselves. Here it is:



And I'm posting it now because I have several things to say about that, and they are:

1. When I try to listen to this video on my phone using headphones, for some reason, it comes through as lispy: The sound doesn't quite synch up so that I hear all the "s" sounds as "th" sounds, which is really quite annoying to me.

I had been wondering why that was, and then, reading The New Yorker last night, an article about a scientist who studies perceptions of time, I found out that when watching movies and the like -- including, presumably, videos on Youtube -- engineers don't try to make the sound match the image perfectly, because our brains edit what we're seeing to make the sound match the image -- provided that the gap isn't that large, our brains automatically edit it out.

That was explained and then expanded on by the scientist noting that we quite literally are living in the past: our brains are always a tiny amount of time behind what we're doing, as they gather up information about our surroundings and piece it together, and that lag means that what you're seeing right now actually happened a few milliseconds ago.

Your whole life is a tape delay.

And, weirdly, short people are less delayed. So Sweetie, who is 9 inches shorter than me, is actually living in my future and I should ask her what things are like so I know what to expect when I get there. And the Babies! are clearly way ahead of us both... as evidenced by this actual picture of Mr F, taken last Friday just after he got home from school:



P.S. All that stuff about time and short people is all true. You can read about it here. Expect me to blather on about this article a lot until I read something else that catches my attention.


2. Remember, I said I had other things to say about this song. So I also will note that I got Mr Bunches to like this song by playing this video, in which you can see them playing the instruments. Mr Bunches is into instruments now; his three favorite things in the world at this moment are airplanes, musical instruments, and climbing on things:


and when I wanted to stop watching his videos and instead play my music while I cleaned up, I played the video in this post for him and pointed out all the instruments, so now he loves this song, and when he watches it, he goes to get my guitar and sits and tries to play guitar in time to the music, which is both cute and extremely encouraging because I never even considered that he might someday be a rock star and I could live off him that way, so it just goes to show you that 90% of parenting is simply "making sure you listen to your music." (I'm like Dr. Spock for the 21st Century.)

3. Finally, I'll get a little (more?) philosophical with this post and point out that you, like me, probably at one point wanted to be a rock star. Sure, maybe you didn't try out for a rock band when you were a freshman in college, and maybe you didn't sing a bunch of songs rewritten as law-school-related parodies like I did in law school, and maybe you didn't with your high school friends invent a fictional band that you were all part of called "Critical Mass," a band that never existed except in your minds, but even if you didn't go that far you probably wanted to be a rock star at one point.

And you probably wanted to be a rock star because they're rich and get to travel and have groupies and own islands and do all those rock-star-type things, but when you considered that you never considered whether the actual being a rock star was as cool as it seems, and when you look at this video, you get the other side of being a rock star, which is this:

It must be godawful boring playing the same songs all the time. Watch that video again: Look at their eyes. Most of them look like they're standing in front of a copying machine or getting ready to work an assembly line.

Their job is playing music for a living, and they look less excited than I get when I see that there's a new case dealing with illegal repossessions. (Okay, I know I'm weird.)

So think about that, the next time you plan on being a rock star or wish you were one: Is it any better to be bored, playing a viola, than it is to be bored sitting in a meeting?

Aside from the whole "owning islands, being rich, etc." part, I mean.

Also, if you still want to be a rock star and think you might become one some day, find a really short person and ask them whether, in the future where they reside, you became one.