Five songs that make dads of daughters start blubbering - BLOG RERUN

NOTE: This post originally ran on my old blog, "They Still Call Me Daddy," on April 6, 2012, and it was far, far, far and away the most widely read thing I had ever written. Back then, my typical post earned about 200 page views. This one has more than 23,000 and counting. It's a subject that apparently resonates with people...

Inside every father of a daughter is a big softie. No matter how hard and tough the guy may seem, I guarantee you he has a tender place in his heart for that little girl.

The music industry knows this and has, on more than one occasion, taken advantage of it by producing songs designed solely to make us cry. I hate them for it.

There are actually relatively few things that will make me cry. If a Cleveland sports team ever wins a championship, I will cry. This is silly, I know, but I won't deny it. If it ever happens in my lifetime, I will cry.

I mist up at most Hallmark movies, too, though I usually deny it and blame it on dust in the room or something.

And anything sentimental to do with my kids – particularly my girls –  will make me cry. I'm no different than most other dads in this respect.

So here, then, is one man's list of the Top Five Daddy-Daughter Songs Designed to Make Grown Men Weep. We'll go in reverse order...

#5 - "Daddy's Little Girl" - The Mills Brothers
(EDITOR'S NOTE: I originally listed the artist as Al Martino, but as a commenter below correctly pointed out, The Mills Brothers' version is the most widely known.) No list of this kind would be complete without the most requested Father-Daughter Dance song of all time. From the very first verse, The Mills Brothers go for the heartstrings: "You're the end of the rainbow / My pot of gold / You're daddy's little girl / To have and to hold." If any of my daughters make me dance to this song at their wedding, I will collapse into a sobbing heap right then and there. That's it, just four lines into the song and I'll be done. I'll telling them this now so they can be prepared for major embarrassment on their big day.

#4 - "Stealing Cinderella" - Chuck Wicks
Country singers are experts at exploiting the daddy-daughter relationship. We could actually have filled this list with nothing but country tunes, but for my money, this one is the best. It tells the story of a guy going to his girlfriend's father to ask for her hand in marriage. It's obvious to him the dad worships his daughter, and that "To him I'm just some fella / Riding in and stealing Cinderella." Note that the Cinderella figure will play a major role later on. For now, if you're not familiar with "Stealing Cinderella," check out the video.

#3 - "When She Loved Me" - Sarah McLachlan
Kind of a surprise entry. On the surface, this isn't necessarily a daddy-daughter song. It's from the "Toy Story 2" soundtrack, and it's sung from the perspective of a doll whose owner has grown up and doesn't play with her anymore. But the song has always reminded me of my daughters, and sometimes specifically of Elissa and the two years or so when I worked nights and was with her every day while Terry was at work. "Through the summer and the fall / We had each other, that was all / Just she and I together / Like it was meant to be." Excuse me for a second, someone must have emptied the vacuum cleaner bag because it's getting really dusty in here...

#2 - "Butterfly Kisses" - Bob Carlisle
Darn you, Bob Carlisle. You're an evil, evil man. This song is terrible, and by that I mean it's awesome. What makes it terrible is that it's one of those "let's follow the little girl as she grows up and becomes a woman and end on her wedding day as her father walks her down the aisle" songs. Which of course makes you realize that time passes impossibly fast and that you're probably not making the most of it. Every time I hear this song, I go looking for Melanie to see if she wants to play a board game or go outside or just do anything except grow up like her rotten sisters are doing.

#1 - "Cinderella" - Steven Curtis Chapman
You want to feel guilty? You want to feel terrible? You don't even have to listen to the song itself. Just listen to Steven Curtis Chapman explain the inspiration for it. That's enough right there to make you feel like the worst parent in the world. And then consider how he must feel every time he sings it and has to think about his 5-year-old daughter who was killed when her brother accidentally ran her over in his SUV as she was playing in the family driveway. I have "Cinderella" on my iPod, and sometimes when I listen to it I don't know whether to feel terrible, inspired, or both. I lean toward "inspired," but it's hard not to feel guilty about the amount of time you spend with your little girls when he sings, "'Cause all too soon the clock will strike midnight / And she'll be gone." Wow.

Here's why Wikipedia is so awesome

Look, I know you're not supposed to trust everything you read on the Internet, particularly on Wikipedia, which is built on the premise that any moron with access to a computer can edit it.

But look at this: Wikipedia has an article about today: February 25th. Seriously, go ahead and click on it. You're going to find a long list of things that happened on this date in history, most of which mean almost nothing to me.

Unless it's your birthday or anniversary or something, February 25th is just another day. Except that Wikipedia is here to show you that February 25th is an amazing day.

At least, it was an amazing day for Marie-Adelaide, who 103 years ago today became the first reigning Grand-Duchess of Luxembourg. I don't even know who Marie-Adelaide was, and I have only a rough idea where Luxembourg actually is. But I'm interested enough to go learn more about her, and that's thanks to Wikipedia.

Speaking of places I could only find on a map after thinking about it for a few minutes, that Wikipedia article also tells me that 35 years ago today, the government of Suriname was overthrown in a military coup. You didn't know that, did you? And now you do. You're a better person, and again, you have Wikipedia to thank.

I graduated from college a few years before the Internet really took off, but I imagine that many a history report and English essay owes its existence to last-minute "research" conducted on Wikipedia. Which is totally wrong and totally lazy, yet totally awesome.

By the way, Wikipedia has separate articles that will tell you what happened on any given day of the year. Here are a few to check out: June 13th, September 18th, December 2nd, and March 31st. You're welcome.

Other than the cost of Internet access and hardware, all of this information is free for you and me. We can look it up any time we want. And Wikipedia has a team of editors and overseers whose job it is to make sure that even when a moron does start messing with the articles, it gets cleaned up right away.

Do you understand what I'm telling you here? It's all free. And it's all on Wikipedia. Free. Wikipedia. Five minutes on Wikipedia and you walk away a better, more knowledgeable person.

Why am I the only one amazed by this?

This is a universal truth

Few things make me happier than:

(1) Peanut butter sandwiches

(2) This guy talking about peanut butter sandwiches (make sure you unmute it by clicking on the little speaker in the bottom right corner):

Come and do the iPod Shuffle with me

It has been a couple of years since we last did the iPod Shuffle, the game in which you put your iPod (or equivalent digital music player) into shuffle mode and let everyone know the results, along with any commentary you would like to add.

No cheating on this, by the way. You have to report the first five songs that come up when you hit shuffle no matter how embarrassing they may be. Feel free to respond in the comments section of the blog itself with your results. Or, if you're someone who comes to us through Facebook, you can do it there, too.

Here's what my iPod just spit out when I let it go all random on me:

(1) "Seasons of Love" – Donny Osmond
Wow, that got really bad really fast, didn't it? There's no way I can justify having this song. It's from the musical "Rent," which of course is the manliest of all musicals. And it's sung by Donny Osmond who is, um, the manliest of all singers. I just really like the tune, OK? And plus I've seen Donny Osmond perform live twice, which is in no way something I should have just typed. Let's move on...

(2) "Going Somewhere" – Colin Hay
I have a lot of Colin Hay in my library. You'll remember him as the lead singer of the Australian band Men at Work back in the early and mid-80's. I've been keeping up with his solo career ever since and even got to meet him 10 years ago. Good guy.

(3) "In Your Eyes" – Peter Gabriel
This is a hard song to escape if you listen to radio stations that play 80s music, as I do. It was probably the prom theme at a few schools back then, and it actually holds up well over time. Also, it includes some vocal work by Youssou N'Dour, a Senegalese musician who has never gotten the credit he deserves.

(4) "Message in a Bottle" – The Police (Live in Boston - 1979)
I have 11 different versions of this song in my iTunes library. Some are live, some are recorded. Some are by The Police, some are by Sting as a solo artist. And one is by a band called The Swingers, who recorded an entire album of Sting covers as cheesy, horn-based instrumentals. This is probably my second favorite Sting-composed song behind "The Lazarus Heart."

(5) "Grim Cathedral" – David Francey
Chances are you don't know who David Francey is, though his name might ring a bell if you're Canadian. Or if you're into folk music. If you're a Canadian AND a folk music fan, then you darn well better know who he is. David is an outstanding musician from the Toronto area who has won multiple Juno Awards, which is like the Canadian Grammy. He's also a Facebook friend of mine who might see this, so if you could pretend that you're as big a David Francey fan as I am, I would appreciate it.

When you can't figure out why your spouse married you in the first place

I've heard it said that women enter marriage hoping to change their husbands, while men enter marriage hoping their wives never change.

I don't know how true that is, but I do know this: After nearly 23 years of marriage, I think my wife knows that I'm pretty much a what-you-see-is-what-you-get proposition. You're either driving me off the lot as-is or you're walking the other way.

And so far, incredibly, she has chosen to stick around.

Which is saying something, because if I lay it out in a balance sheet format, I'm finding that life with me has a lot more debits than credits.

There's the whole has-no-mechanical-aptitude thing, which gets pretty annoying (and expensive) if you live in a house, since the guiding principle of home ownership is that anything that can break most certainly will, and so will everything else that you thought couldn't.

I'm also a worrier who is constantly reassessing his life plan. You probably don't even have a life plan. I have something like four of them, and I switch from one to the other every week or so depending on which way the wind blows.

I don't cook much. I have little interest in yard work outside of cutting the grass. I'm not especially spontaneous. And I eat foods you probably don't like and listen to music you almost certainly don't like.

I allow my mood to be dictated on autumn Sundays by the fortunes of a perennially losing professional football team.

And I complain about not getting enough sleep but won't do anything to actually get myself to bed at a decent time.

What a catch! I know you ladies are lining up to see if you can steal me away.

On the plus side, I always wash the dishes because I can't stand to leave them in the sink. I'll clean your litter boxes if you have cats. And if you're playing Trivia Crack, I'm handy to have in the room if you don't know the leading hitter on the 1962 St. Louis Cardinals (Stan Musial, of course), the guy who invented the helicopter (depends on who you talk to, but usually thought to be Paul Cornu), or various other bits of minutiae that fill my head.

Aaaaaaand, that about wraps up the positives.

I don't say this to be self-deprecating or anything. It's just kind of the way it is. Unless you have a huge ego, you can probably come up with a lot of negatives about yourself, too.

For the most part, I actually don't mind my flaws. They're what make me who I am. I just don't know if I would go so far as to marry me, or someone like me. But Terry did, and I've never thought of her as especially crazy. So there must be something there that attracted her.

I think it's my blog. Chicks totally dig low-profile lifestyle bloggers.

Four things I miss

This is what old people do, you know: Talk about the way things used to be and how it was so much better back in their day.

I don't know how much "better" things were when I was younger, but I do know there are things I miss. For example:

Game Rooms

Or "video arcades." Whatever you want to call them. These were places where you could bring a couple of dollars, buy some tokens, and happily spend the next few hours playing Pac Man, Donkey Kong, Frogger, Centipede, etc. And now they're mostly gone.

Well, there are still arcades around at malls and amusement parks and places like that. But there are a lot fewer of them, and the ones that do exist are filled with expensive games I don't want to play.

When I had a newspaper route, I would regularly stop by one of my customer's houses on my way to the game room and collect their biweekly bill. That amounted to $3.10 for those who received The News-Herald every day, which was more than enough to fund an afternoon at Galaxy Gardens, the game room that was a 5-minute bike ride from my house.

Now home video game systems have advanced to the point that there's no need for game rooms. Which is OK. I just miss putting on my painter's cap (adorned with buttons representing various early-80s bands) and heading to the game room so I can try and beat my high score on Defender.

Johnny Carson

Hey, I love Jimmy Fallon. And Letterman. And Craig Ferguson. They're all great, as far as I'm concerned. But Johnny was a staple. He showed up on your TV every night, walking onstage to the same music and, to some extent, telling the same jokes. And it was great. It was something you could count on.

But "The Tonight Show" has moved on (as it should) and Johnny himself is gone. Which is kind of sad.

My elementary school

They tore it down to build homes for old people, or something like that. It's not like I would return to Mapledale Elementary School every day if it was still there. It's the idea that I could if I wanted to. I'm old enough that none of my old teachers would still be there, but just having the chance to walk through the halls and smell that elementary school smell again would be a lot of fun. So it goes.

Not knowing (or caring) how most of the food we ate was terribly unhealthy

Part of this was simply because I was a kid at the time, but we ate all kinds of horrible things back in The Day that would kill a lab rat in hours. We didn't know it was bad for us, nor did we much care. And come to think of it, most of the adults I knew took pretty much the same attitude.

Well, I mean, we knew that McDonald's wasn't the most healthy food in the world, but the general feeling was that if you kept it to once a day or so, you would be fine. As it turns out, the only people who turned out to be "fine" in that arrangement are today's cardiologists.

Nowadays I conduct a quick nutritional analysis of everything I put into my mouth. It doesn't mean I won't eat it, just that I make sure to feel really guilty about it if it's anything other than spinach or blueberries or something.

I think I liked it better when I didn't know I was poisoning myself.

10,000 steps a day? How about 1,000 steps? Would you settle for that?

By now you've heard the recommendation that we should all take at least 10,000 steps every day to maintain health, avoid an early death, stave off bubonic plague, clear up our skin, save the whales, and ensure world peace.

Or at least that's how it seems. According to many health bloggers – and trust me, I read a lot of them – 10,000 steps a day is the key to eternal life.

There are at least two things that should be noted about this 10,000 steps guideline:

(1) There's honestly nothing scientifically significant about 10,000 steps. The whole thing started in the 60s as part of a Japanese marketing campaign to sell pedometers. (A helpful rule of thumb in life is that if something seems crazy, the Japanese are probably involved.) 10,000 is a nice round number, but they could just as easily have said 9,000 steps or 11,000 steps. But 10,000 looks a lot better in an ad than those other numbers, so 10,000 it is.

(2) 10,000 steps is said to equate to about five miles of walking for the average person, though common sense tells you that some people's strides are longer than others and that therefore 10,000 steps will translate to different distances for different people. But what's certain is that 10,000 steps is a long way for most of us.

I'm a runner. Not a highly competitive one by any stretch, but I'm consistently out on the road running 4-5 days every week, virtually without exception. I like to think that fact makes me a healthy person, but at best I cover 15-20 miles a week. If 10,000 steps = 5 miles a day, it should be noted that 5 miles a day = 35 miles a week. And I haven't run that far in a long, long time.

Some will tell you that running is different and that you don't have to run as far to be credited with 10,000 steps than you do just walking. Whatever. The point is, I personally know maybe two people who regularly propel their bodies anywhere close to 35 miles a week, and both of them are certifiably insane endurance athletes.

Does that mean the rest of us are doomed?

Maybe. The 10,000-step advocates will point out that you don't have to get your steps in all at once, and that they can (and even should) be accumulated throughout the day by keeping busy via housework, yardwork, walking breaks at work, etc.

I don't know about you, but I sit at a desk all day. Sometimes for 9 or 10 hours at a stretch with only a few trips to the bathroom that maybe get me an additional 250 steps. And as we've found out recently, constant sitting is "the new smoking." It will kill you as easily as that cheeseburger will.

So what's a person to do? Personally, I'm opting for panic. There's no way my schedule will allow for a consistent 10,000 steps every day, so I've settled on constant worry as my coping mechanism while the specter of a sedentary death looms over me.

Which, ironically, will also kill you. Stress, I mean. Stress and sitting all day are bad for you. As is smoking. As are trans fats. As is everything else in the universe.

I'll think about that the next time I'm walking from the TV to the kitchen for a snack. By the time I get back to the couch, I'll only have 9,950 steps to go that day!

How depressing.

I should start giving blood again (and so should you)

Regardless of what the title might suggest, I don't mean this to be a preachy post about why you should get yourself to a blood drive and allow them to take a pint of  blood from your arm this very instant.

There are actually lots and lots of people for whom giving blood is not an option, for one legitimate medical reason or another. And I know that previous negative experiences with blood donation or needles in general can make it very difficult for others to give.

But for the rest of us, there's really not much of an excuse, is there?

According to my Red Cross blood donor card, I have donated 97 times in my life. That's just over 12 gallons I've given over the years, and I will say that I'm kind of proud of that.

In fact, I wish I could tell you that the primary reason I give blood is to help people. I mean, that is what I want to accomplish. But if I'm being honest, I'll tell you that what motivates me most to get into the car and head to a blood drive is not the altruistic nature of the process. It's to push my donation number even higher.

I MUST GET TO 100 DONATIONS. I MUST REACH 15 GALLONS, 20 GALLONS, 25 GALLONS. I MUST DO THIS SO THAT OTHERS WILL RECOGNIZE ME AS A GOOD PERSON.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: You don't have to tell me what a weird, terrible little person I am. I already know.

I do love the idea that up to three people may be helped by every whole-blood donation I make. But what I really want are those little donation milestone pins they give you when you hit a particular gallon milestone.

Several years ago I used to give via apheresis, where they take blood from you, remove the platelets, and put what's left back into your body. It takes a couple of hours, but platelets are extremely important to a wide range of people, from cancer and heart surgery patients to transplantees and traumatic injury victims.

My friend Peter Clausen gives platelets often. Like, really often. He makes his way downtown to the donation center every week or so and listens to classical music (often "air conducting" the piece himself) while they remove his platelets.

Peter has given hundreds of times. Who knows how many people are still alive because of his generosity and others like him?

I used to feel like that myself. But another fact my donation card reveals is that I haven't given blood since December 27, 2013. I would tell you the reason is that I've been too busy, but you and I both know I'm just rationalizing there, so why bother?

I'll you what: I promise I'll get myself to a blood drive in the next few weeks if you do the same. What do you think?

For all the blessings you and I enjoy, I'm thinking it's the least we can do.

Deal? Deal.

What your choice of board game says about you - Blog Rerun

NOTE: The following was originally posted on my old blog ("They Still Call Me Daddy") on December 28, 2011. I like it so much that I'm bringing it back here. Which is both narcissistic and lazy. But as I always say, I try to deliver to you, the reader, full value for the price you pay me to visit this blog. Which is of course nothing, so do the math...


We're a board game kind of family.

And by "board" game, I don't just mean the ones where you roll a dice and move a little piece around a sheet of pressed cardboard, though Lord knows we have dozens of those. I also mean checkers, chess, cribbage, Scrabble, and Yahtzee, and oodles and oodles of card games.

In our downstairs storage room is a seven-foot cabinet filled top to bottom with almost every game you can imagine. We never lack for choices.

One reason we like board games is because we like winning. If there's one thing I've passed down to my kids, it's a competitive streak. I like to win. They like to win. There is little mercy expected and almost none shown during one of our family board game sessions. You might think, "But isn't it about having fun?" And we would respond, "Yes, but isn't the greatest kind of fun seeing an opponent land on Boardwalk and Park Place when you own them with hotels, and watching the other person burst into tears as they hand over the small fortune in Monopoly money they've spent 2 1/2 hours accumulating?"

We like to play virtually anything, but there's a subtle message conveyed in the specific board game you select. Like the car you drive or the clothes you wear, a board game says something about you. Here's what I'm talking about:

CLUE
People who like to play Clue are violent sociopaths. They have no interest in free-market real estate (Monopoly), choosing a career and raising a family (Life), or out-and-out lying (Balderdash). They want a game that involves the gruesome bludgeoning or stabbing death of a rich guy, and the subsequent trial, conviction and execution of the murderer (who, by the way, always seems to be Colonel Mustard when I play). Be careful, because if you beat them at Clue, they're liable to reenact the murder scene with you playing the part of Mr. Boddy. Just saying.

BATTLESHIP
Battleship is a game of luck. Winning is random, unless you're playing a little kid who packs their ships into that compact "I have no idea what I'm doing" square of doom. I'm not saying that being a good Battleship player is the equivalent of being a good slot machine player, but....well, yes, actually I am saying that. They're both hit and miss. But hey, there's no shame in the fact that you lack deductive reasoning or any other socially redeemable skills.

MONOPOLY
Like Monopoly? Then you're a cheater. Yes, you heard me, you're a cheater. No honest person genuinely enjoys Monopoly, because an honestly played game of Monopoly takes 14 hours. The game only ends in a reasonable amount of time if the banker is giving himself interest-free loans on the sly, or if someone else grabs a deed they didn't pay for in order to complete a monopoly ("Wait, you have Marvin Gardens? I don't remember you buying that." "Oh yeah, it was an hour ago. You must not have noticed.") You might be saying, "Well, I never do either of those. I don't cheat at Monopoly." Yeah? Do you do that thing where you put money on Free Parking and give it to the next person who lands there? Then you're a cheater. It's not in the rules. Look it up.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT
If Trivial Pursuit is your first choice, you're an insufferable, overly competitive know-it-all. I should know, because I'M an insufferable, overly competitive know-it-all, and Trivial Pursuit is always my first choice. Why? Because I know that no matter who you are, I'll probably destroy you. My mind is filled with useless knowledge. Rarely is it of much use unless I'm playing Trivial Pursuit or appearing on the occasional television game show. Never play Trivial Pursuit with someone who wants to play Trivial Pursuit, that's my advice to you.

CHESS, CHECKERS, SCRABBLE, BOGGLE, STRATEGO AND ANY OTHER OF THOSE GAMES I'M NOT VERY GOOD AT
People who choose these games are all smarter than me. I can do random trivia, sure, but that's no indication of intelligence. That's just having a photographic memory and the gift of instant recall. These are games of strategy that require clear thinking, a quick mind, and the ability to anticipate your opponent's moves. I lack those skills, and the people who have them are exactly what I want to be when I grow up. But let me get them on the other side of a Candyland board and I'll wipe the floor with them. I have five kids, man. I'll be past Queen Frostine and on my way to victory before they even know what hit them.

I'm trying to break an addiction to nose drops (really)

At some point long ago in our marriage, my wife introduced me to the wonderful elixir known as nose drops.

You may not know what nose drops are. In fact, you probably don't. Most people I've come across are unfamiliar with them. Nose drops are essentially nasal spray in drop form. You take an eyedropper, pop a few drops into each nostril, suck it up into your nasal passages, and boom...if you're congested, I guarantee you'll clear right up in the next 1-2 minutes.

If that sounds really disgusting to you, I can't disagree. And the first time or two you try them, you're very likely to gag. It's an acquired skill, this whole "sucking liquid up into your sinuses without blinking."

But I am very good at it. Very, very good at it.

The reason is because once I discovered how incredibly effective nose drops are – far more effective as a decongestant for me than conventional nasal spray – I turned to them every time I had a cold. Or even just the sniffles. There are few things worse to me than not being able to breathe, and nose drops cleared me up every time.

The problem was, I started taking them even what I wasn't technically sick. I would get over my cold and still found that my breathing was restricted. So I took some more nose drops.

Everyone reading this who is familiar with nasal spray addiction knows exactly where this is going.

After awhile, I took nose drops all the time. All. The. Time. And the problem with taking nose drops or nasal spray (their addictive properties are the same because their essential ingredient is the same) all the time is that you become absolutely dependent on them. Physically and even mentally.

It's a phenomenon called "rebound congestion." Click on the link for the gory details.

Looking back at my first sentence above, it may seem that I'm blaming my wife for me becoming hooked on an over-the-counter drug. And that's not the case at all. She was just the unscrupulous street-corner dealer who gave me my gateway hit.

I kid, I kid. She's actually the one who long ago told me I was headed down a dangerous path with my nose drops. And she was, of course, right.

Anyway, I now go through 1-2 bottles of nose drops a week. At six bucks a pop, it's not quite as expensive as a cigarette habit, but it's still costs you.

It also leads to sleep disruption, or at least it does in my case. I get up every night, without exception, at least once to suck in a few nose drops so I can breathe better and fall back asleep.

Actually typing it all out and reading it makes this situation really seem terrible. And it IS a bad thing that I need to address.

So I'm starting to try and wean myself away from the nose drops. There are several ways to do it. You can go cold turkey, but I get so plugged up after a few hours that I'm not sure I could hack that. You're also encouraged to use a neti pot, which I do own and may try.

But the most ingenious method for breaking the cycle I've come across is the one-nostril-at-a-time approach. You continue taking your nose drops or nasal spray as usual in one nostril, but you leave the other one alone. It's an annoying feeling not being able to breathe out of a single nostril while the other one is clear, but as far as I can tell, there's no way to get out of this whole thing that isn't at least slightly annoying.

Anyway, the idea is that after a few weeks, one nostril will be permanently clear, allowing you to start work on the other one. I've just begun, so I can't tell you how well it works yet, but it gives me hope that there's a way out of this.

I'll have to let you know how it goes.

'Maybe I'm a whale' and other misheard lyrics

We recently held our annual Employee Appreciation Gala at work, and one of the featured segments was a video of various employees dancing to Shakira's song "Waka Waka (This Time for Africa)," which was the official song of the 2010 soccer World Cup (which you already knew of course, right?)

Anyway, when we were soliciting employees to choreograph and videotape their group dances to the song, it quickly became apparent to me and to a co-worker who is also a middle-aged white guy that we couldn't understand half of what Shakira was singing.

Assuming others might have this problem, we had our video editor produce a clip whereby the lyrics appeared at the bottom of the screen as Shakira sang them.

Mind you, I did not suddenly develop this inability to fully understand lyrics when I entered my 40s. I've always had trouble deciphering them, and of course some singers are worse than others.

Back in the early 1980s when I first became interested in popular music, one of my favorite bands was an English group called The Fixx. One of their big hits was a song called "Saved by Zero," the chorus of which had lead vocalist Cy Curnin singing "maybe I'll win, saved by zero."

Except I was sure he was singing "maybe I'm a whale, saved by zero." I realize this makes no sense, but my general outlook on most of the New Wave music I listened to back then was that it almost never made sense. And that it made no sense intentionally because...well, just because that's how pop music was.

I was stunned to learn eventually that I had not interpreted that lyric correctly.

My friend Matt always insisted that in the song "Sunglasses at Night," Corey Hart sang a line that went "don't push the play on a diet shake." Again, this makes no sense, but it's not much worse than the actual line, which was "don't switch the blade on the guy in shades."

My sister-in-law Chris apparently had some trouble with the Eurythmics' "Sweet Dreams Are Made of This." She seemed to think Annie Lennox was singing, "Who has a mind to disagree?" Close, but not right. Real lyric: "Who am I to disagree?"

There is, by the way, an entire website dedicated to misheard lyrics called www.kissthisguy.com. Its name stems from the often-botched line from Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" that goes "'scuse me while I kiss the sky." Many over the years have heard that as, "'scuse me while I kiss this guy." Which is really one of the better ones.

Another personal favorite from that site: In Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire," he sings, "It was always burning since the world's been turning." But apparently some guy thought it was, "It was always burning, said the worst attorney."

Not understanding Shakira? I can relate to that. Not understanding Billy Joel? Impossible. Open your ears, whippersnappers.

Meeting famous people and looking stupid

You see that distorted photo above? (I can't seem to fix it. Sorry about that.) The man in the middle, wearing the black T-shirt, is Sting. The musician, that is, not the wrestler. He looks cool and happy.

Now see the guy just to the right (Sting's left) wearing the goofy round glasses? That's me. I look happy, too, but not especially cool. I look like someone standing in the back of a group of people straining to be seen so that he could later say he had his picture taken with Sting.

Which is exactly what I was.

This photo was taken in July 1996 backstage at Blossom Music Center in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. Sting was less than a half hour away from taking the stage for a show in front of 15,000 people in the middle of his "Mercury Falling" tour.

The kid wearing the backwards hat on the far right is my nephew, Mark. He was working security in a retail store and made friends with one of the cosmetic counter girls. That girl happened to be the cousin of Sting's drummer, Vinnie Colaiuta (the other guy in the photo wearing glasses besides me). She got us the backstage passes.

Sting has always been my favorite musician. He's immensely talented and I love his songwriting, his bass-playing, and his singing. I think I have virtually every song he has ever recorded.

Getting the chance to meet him was a wonderful, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He came over and shook my hand, and I responded by saying to him, "BLAHOODA MUFIGOLOWICH!" Or something like that. All I know is that it was loud and unintelligible, and he responded with a very polite, "I beg your pardon?"

Sting and other famous people are used to this, I'm sure. People get tongue-tied around them, and they learn to be very smooth about it. I was trying to tell Sting how much of a fan I was and to ask him some questions about a couple of his more obscure songs.

But instead, all I could muster was two minutes' worth of variations on "BLAHOODA MUFIGOLOWICH!" Sting did his best to make conversation with me until he had to move on to the others who had snagged backstage passes and were waiting for their opportunity to talk to him.

Sting is easily the most famous person I've met, but in later years when I met other celebrity types (hockey legends Mario Lemieux and Gordie Howe and Men at Work lead singer Colin Hay among them) I got better at calming myself and speaking clearly.

And I'll admit it's silly that I even have to do that. These are just people, after all. Well-known people, but still, just people. And I've invested in them some sort of glorified status that makes me nervous when I get within 10 feet of them. It makes no sense, and they themselves probably find it all a little tiring.

Celebrity worship is an interesting human phenomenon. I admire people who are genuinely nonplussed around stars. I'm embarrassed to admit what a fan boy I am about certain writers, musicians and athletes, but even at the age of 45, it happens.

So I'm interested to know: Who are the most famous people you've met? And were you at all nervous when you met them? Feel free to post in the comments below.

The Keurig vs. the iPod - Which is the greatest invention of the last 30 years?

As the son of a Gadget Guy, I gravitate naturally toward technology. I can rarely afford to buy it, you understand, but I do gravitate toward it.

Growing up, we were among the first people in our neighborhood to have cable TV, a VCR, and a home video game system.

Actually, I should have put "home video game system" in quotes, because what it was was a cheap, black-and-white Pong-based game from Radio Shack that my dad brought home one night in 1978. He hooked it up to our living room TV, and suddenly I was playing video games. At home. In my living room.

A stunning innovation at the time.

Two years later, he bought us an Atari 2600, and thus began a long love affair with video games and computers that peaked in the mid-1980s when I got really good at the arcade game "Track and Field." This was a game where you had to mash two buttons really, really fast in order to make your little pixellated video game athlete run and jump through a variety of events.

A lot of guys (and it was really only guys who played it) would cheat by putting a comb between their fingers, which allowed them to develop a lightning-fast rhythm that would propel their video runners to sub-8-second 100-meter dash times.

But I played it straight. In large part because I couldn't figure out the comb thing. The point is, I was really good.

Well no, actually, the point is I like technology and gadgets and stuff like that. And for my money, the two best gadgets of the past 30 years are the Keurig coffee maker and Apple's wonderful iPod.

My kids bought me a Keurig for Father's Day a few years ago. I was just getting into coffee then, and getting the Keurig pushed me over the top into full-on addiction. I'm proud to say I remain physically and mentally dependent on the hot brown liquid until this day!

OK, not something to be proud of, but also not something to be denied. Coffee snobs will tell you the Keurig makes a low-quality drink, but I ignore them. What it does is make coffee as fast and convenient as it can be. It's ingenious, really, and it spawned an entire industry of companies that do nothing but make those little K-Cups.

All of which is cool. But the iPod? Well...the iPod is mythical. When I was a teenager, I was really into music. And the accepted medium for popular music in the 80s was the cassette. I had lots of cassettes. Like hundreds of them, all stored in cheap plastic holders that my dad undoubtedly bought at a discount store and screwed into my bedroom wall.

Cassettes were an extremely portable form of music, if by "portable" you mean "assuming you're willing to lug around a 13-pound boom box on your shoulder." But then came the Walkman, which allowed you to listen to your favorite cassettes in a little metal box that weighed less than a pound.

I figured that was the pinnacle of technological achievement. You had to carry multiple cassettes if you wanted musical variety, but that seemed a small price to pay.

But then – I don't even know how to describe how stunning and revolutionary this was – Apple came out with the iPod in the early 2000s. There were no tapes involved. Everything was digital. And the darn thing fit in the palm of your hand.

I just...I mean...if you're old enough to remember it, you know what I'm talking about. Suddenly, the future was here. You could carry around hundreds of songs. And nowadays it's well into the thousands.

Amazing.

So while the Keurig and the iPod are both life-changing inventions for me, if you ask which one is better, I'm going with the iPod. Every time.

Seriously, I can listen to Iron Maiden AND Air Supply back to back with just a couple of screen swipes? Yeah, I'm buying into that.