Got hosed at work again today. My project manager called in sick so that I had to deal with all of the wonderful client issues that cropped up today. And, to top it off, there was some sort of issue with another program that another team was working on. It had to be tested on a dial-up connection. Apparently, mine is the only computer with a working dial-up connection. So, every couple of hours, I had to stop what I was doing, and connect to a 56k dial-up to try and watch a video program that wouldn't download properly. All in all, a crappy day. So, now I sit at home and try and catch up on my own work since I spent most of the day doing someone else's.
This article caught what little attention was diverted today. It's very true. Children's songs tend to burrow in and they aren't the only ones. It's interesting to see how the mind functions when it comes to the mystery of melody and lyrics. Meet my childhood neighbor for any length of time and surely one of the slightly less embarrassing stories that she'll regale you with is the fact that when I was about 3 or 4, I would spend hours on their porch singing into a magic marker with a piece of yarn tied around it. However, I didn't stop with things like the Sesame Street theme song. Apparently I did things as diverse as "Bye Bye Love" by the Everly Brothers and "Sleepin' Single in a Double Bed" by Barbara Mandrell. Songs that I really had no intellectual knowledge of, just the ability to reproduce all the necessary sounds. I've noticed some of this starting in Gage as he mimics sounds and has melodies already committed to memory as he works on replicating the actual words to the melody.
Although Terri does the lion's share of putting the little one to sleep, I've certainly had my turn at it. And one of the things that I've noticed is that Gage usually enjoys being sung to. It's a nice challenge to see how many different songs I can remember from start to finish. A few Fridays ago, Gage and I were at dinner at the Warner's household. Susie was there as well and when Gage started his little dance routine, we always call it his "Happy Feet" after what I know as the old Cab Calloway song which was redone on the Muppet Show by Kermit the Frog. Turns out Susie had sung the song when she was back in school and still remembered the majority of the lyrics. Which led to me postulate the following:

Think about all the songs you've heard on the radio that you can sing from start to finish with all the little nuances that accompany the song.
Add to this all the songs that you can sing from start to finish with the song playing on the radio
Add in all the songs that you can make it 95% of the way through with assistance from the radio, perhaps only transposing a word or two
Now top that off with the number of songs that you know a verse or the chorus
Add in the number of songs that you know from various other factions in your life that aren't related to the radio (Hymns, Girls Scout Songs, Boy Scout Songs, Campfire Songs, Church related songs, etc.)
Top it off with things like commercial jingles and theme songs.

Come up with an approximate total? Neither did I. The number went into the thousands and I lost count.
Imagine if I could harness the brainpower storing these lyrics and use it for an applied situation. I can tell you that in the second verse of the song "Bless the Broken Road" by Melodie Crittenden, there is a line that says, "I'd like to take the time I lost and give it back to you." In the more recent Rascal Flatts version of the same song, the line becomes "I'd like to have the time I lost and give it back to you." And yet, it takes a few seconds of staring off into space before I remember something along the lines of the denotation for Planck's constant is h. It takes another bit of staring to realize that it is Max Planck that this is named for or after and it is mostly used in Quantum mechanics.
If I could put on a pair of glasses akin to Cyclops in the X-Men series to turn that brainpower keeping all the lyrics stored in my head into a focused source of intelligence, I could be ruling the world at the moment. Why, I could think great thoughts, I could...I could...I could wile away the hours, conferrin' with the flowers, consultin' with the rain. And my head I'd be scratchin' while my thoughts were busy hatchin' if I only had a brain.
Certainly this has rambled on a little longer than I expected, but when I glanced at my shelves of CD's, tapes, records, and 8-tracks...I realized that if I only knew one song on each I was already over 7,000.
And as a parting shot, with the exception of the bad over-the-top singing, Minnie Driver had no business being in the Phantom of the Opera and I'm only 20 minutes into it.