I had the good fortune and enough spare time to take a leisure pop-music history course last year. I was made aware of people, places and eras that would have generated blank stares in the past. One of the first terms discussed in the course was Tin Pan Alley. The birthplace of what I will grossly generalize as "stuck-up-white-people-music". Skipping over lots of details, lets just say they had the market cornered for quite a while. Releasing such hits as, "Take me out to the ballgame", and this classic, amongst others. Except this version is much better and related to Tin Pan Alley.

I do that often don't I? Deviate from the point (if you think I have one), and then deviate from those deviations.

Thus, I was outraged to read about this. I know you don't like clicking, so here's my one sentence recap:

Tin Pan Alley is now being sold off and turned into skyscrapers! I don't know who dropped the ball on getting this site declared as historic, especially since this place, that place, and here all have that status.

There's nothing really important there. I picked three boring places to emphasize my point. Feel free not to click and take my word for it.

The point is, and people of New York, you should probably drop everything you're doing and read this next sentence carefully, if you really liked Tin Pan Alley that much, you should've put a ring on it.

Uh-huh, I just did go there.

The REAL Point Is: In the event that Tin Pan Alley is brutally gutted and replaced forever by new and cool housing options...

...

...I would totally live there.

That.

They're gonna bring their kids to you. At work.

And I thought, why do we limit this opportunity of providing a glimpse into our daily lives to kids in grade nine? It's not like grade niners are excited to go to work; in fact, that demographic avoids work like the black plague. I could probably find a statistic that says that 70% of grade niners skip one or more classes a day. But who needs to find something when they can just make it up (War in Iraq!)

In light of this, I propose to expand, "take your kids to work day" to, "take all inquiring (some to the point of annoying) minds to work week". Watch how I do this, alliteratively (how is that a word, I was expecting to make more things up to provide an unexpected continuity to this post...bah-humbugs), I will bold and capitalize because apparently, my blogs are confusing, so this should be as clear as crystallized hearts (what?):

Mondays are take your Mom to work.
Tuesdays are take your Tots to work.
Wednesdays are take your Wives to work. Because only husbands work, not wives, especially here in the year 1902...oh what's that? I was only cracking a joke to make this fit an alliteratory (THERE WE GO) pattern?

*dodges tomato thrown by angry mob*

Thursdays are take your, uh, Thursdays are take your Time getting to work day.
Fridays are take your Friends to work day.

(work doesn't know about Saturday's and Sunday's, shhhhh)

Someone once asked very poignantly, "Now why you wanna go and do that love huh, huh, hey why you wanna go and do that, and do that?" And I'ma tell ya. It's real hard to explain to everyone exactly what you do. If I say, "computers", you might just assume that I fix printers or something cool not-so-up-to-my-skill-level. If I start really explaining to you what I do, not that I can because it's supposedly client confidential, you'd do the whole nod-your-head, pretend-to-understand, figure-out-the-best-question-to-ask-that-wont-make-you-look-completely-stupid-but-wont-spur-on-too-much-more-conversation. Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about.

However, if you take your moms (they tell your pops), your tots (who tell their friends), your wives (who tell their friends) and your friends (they, uh, return the "favor"), you might have covered all your bases (that belong to us), and you won't ever have to talk about work again!

Let's face it. Talking about work, outside of work, is just not appealing.

(I actually don't mind as much as I appear to be ranting, probably because work is still new to me, and it's ever changing, and I like talking, sometimes)

Tomorrow, I will commence my second week of work as a full-fledged business consultant. And while this was mentioned a few times over the course of my training, one of the skills a consultant must hone early on in his/her career is the ability to answer a question without actually answering the question.

Or, as I'm about to put it, saying nothin' while saying somethin'. Don't get it mixed up with making somethin' out of nothin', or going from nothin' to somethin'. The nothin' and the somethin' occurs at the exact same time.

Moving on.

I am currently in possession of a fancy schmancy dancy clancy key-chain that displays a six-digit code. Did I mention this code changes every 60 seconds? And it can only be used in combination with another set of codes that reside in my brain!

I feel like I am carrying the launch codes to the Canadian nuclear arsenal, you know, the imaginary arsenal that I tell myself Canada is in possession of to get myself to sleep at night.

My blogging skills have sooooo fallen off.

I am participating in a semi-competitive fantasy hockey league with a bunch of colleagues from work. My thinking is that nothing would get me noticed/promoted quicker than smokin' everyone in the yearly fantasy hockey challenge. Am I right or what huh!?

Much to my chagrin, I woke up this morning to find out my goalie had TEN saves last night and let in two goals.

(For the hockey illiterate, that's the equivalent of waking up to find that gas prices shot up ten cents overnight AND that little needle is pointing to 'E' AND your car smells because last night a cat came and peed on the door)

Then, it started to make sense. In fact, it all started to make sense, including these commercials, this universal law and this song.

(That song name drops Obama, but the song itself was released in 2004! That's crazy! That it oddly, in a two-degrees-of-separation way, ties in with the punchline of the story was by pure coincidence (I only discovered this while screening the song for safe blog posting))

You know what's really fun?

Crossword puzzles.

But a very close second is pronouncedly chewing extra-crunchy (in a crispy way, but not like the chocolate bar) grapes to the backbeat (learn things) of that iPod commercial song.

But only because when I win, and the interviewer asks me the question that seems to be so popular these days because inquiring minds like to know these things, "McOysty, before the game, when you were listing to your iPod, what song was playing?", I'd get to look at the camera, flash my winning smile, and answer, "Little Mermaid's - Part Of Your World".

Yes, I'd say "dash".