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Favorite Songs for Shoveling Horse Manure
Politicians do it. TV talking heads do it. Kids do it. If you're over 25 and ever had to do a presentation about something that was out of your league, you've done it too.
I won't get into the tiny moral details -- perhaps a stupid corporate policy makes you give a speech supporting something as idiotic as liquid jellybeans. Or perhaps it's a technical sales pitch, and your job is to note obstacles and remove them as much as possible until the technical pre-sales support gets there. You don't have to be an outright liar. Many times we just have to, well, tap dance. We don't even have to assume you're fooling anybody. Sometimes you just have to dance and everybody else gets to snicker and enjoy it.
I used to have a friend that would introduce me, "And now to tell you more than he actually knows..."
I always hear music when I am getting ready for and/or delivering one of these performances. Some music just seems to go well with shoveling horse manure.
What with one party's candidate making his big speech last week and another coming up this week, we're in for a lot of horse hockey. How about a few tunes to go along with the mood?
This is absolutely the classic
Here's some more you might not have thought about.
While I love Charles Durning and his performance, I'm more of a saturday-morning cartoon person myself. Who can forget all the Looney Tunes characters dancing around at the beginning of each show on Saturdays? Hey, if you're going to do a show, might as well have a talking pig, joke-cracking rabbit, amorous skunk -- anything to get their minds off the fact that you're sucking wind, right? Try this on for size.
Sometimes you don't have super cool graphics and noisemakers to fool them. Sometimes you got Jack Squat -- or maybe just your hand and a sock puppet. There's a song that reminds me that from the simplest props cam come the most elaborate entertainment. This show took a bunch of simple props and made great entertainment. Does the soundtrack ring a bell?
Sometimes you've just got to dress up the pig. Sure -- it makes the pig mad and doesn't make the pig look much better, but sometimes the best way to present something scary bad is to put it in a suit and do a little soft shoe. Whenever I'm doing that, I always think of Gene Wilder and Peter Boyle in "Young Frankenstein"
Right now I'm drawing a blank about others, but I know there are a few more of these "hum along with the BS" songs. When you're watching a politician on TV say with a straight face he doesn't know how all of that FBI bribery money got into his freezer, what tune is going through your head?
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