These are parody or spoof lyrics for the well-known Christmas carol, White Christmas. The classic version of this is by Bing Crosby with Marjorie Reynolds from the movie Holiday Inn in 1942. The video is shown below, from which you can learn the parody lyrics below that. Just imagine the two of them dressed like gangstas or something singing the lyrics below, heheheh!
The lyrics below the video are parody or spoof lyrics to the carol Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas. The video demonstrates the carol, if you are not familiar with it or need a refreshment or check details of the tune. It is a beautiful version by John Denver and Rowlf the Dog of the Muppets, from 1979. Credits to my friend Lorie for introducing me to this video and album.
I’ve always thought the melody of this song to be a tad wistful, even if I can totally see its appropriateness for a pensive and reflective carol that the original is. John and Rowlf did an exceptional job of that. But because of its wistfulness in tune, that was where I got the idea for these parody lyrics.
Christina MacFarlane of CNN reports that 300 million balls are lost or discarded in the United States every year! There were no numbers for world estimates, but you can bet it’s a lot because there are a lot of countries in which golf is being played. I think double the 300 million, would be a conservative estimate. The US might like to play “us versus the world” in those team golf tournaments like the Ryder Cup, but that doesn’t mean they have half the golf players, courses and balls in the world.
Furthermore, each golf ball is estimated to require 100 to 1000 years to decompose naturally. This is according to simulations done by research teams at the Danish Golf Union. It had to be simulations because the golf balls of today haven’t been around 100 years.
In case you don’t think golf ball pollution is a problem, though, scientists who scoured the depths of Scotland’s Loch Ness in a submarine recently, hoping to discover evidence of the prehistoric Loch Ness monster, found hundreds of thousands of golf balls lining the bed of the loch!
That’s hundreds of thousands of golf balls!
Maybe the golf fanatics know about golfing around Loch Ness, but I sure as heck didn’t think there was that much golfing around there. At least not so close that hundreds of thousands of golf balls would be in the lake. It’s not like everybody shoots with the range of Tiger Woods, and even then, that’s not that far to get a golf ball into the loch!
Given the pollution of that magnitude, the poor monster is probably dead from either being pelted by stray golf balls, or having swallowed some in searching for food and picking up large morsels of things at the bottom.
Unfortunately, the pollution of golf balls is not just the presence of those balls. What’s in them is very bad for the environment.
The Danish Golf Association has found that during decomposition, the golf balls dissolved to release a high quantity of heavy metals. Dangerous levels of zinc were found in the synthetic rubber filling used in solid core golf balls. When submerged in water, the zinc attached itself to the ground sediment and poisoned the surrounding flora and fauna. Then, removing a partially degraded ball from a lake or woodland area could result in further damage to the wildlife. It’s not all that simple as picking them up, though a few hundred thousand under water could be rather difficult.
So what can we do about the golf balls? Well, the easiest thing would be to stop playing golf. Golf balls are the least of golf’s environmental impact. Look at these statistics about golf courses from 2004… never mind 2009.
2.5 billion gallons – Amount of water it would take, per day, to support 4.7 billion people at the UN daily minimum, or the amount of water used, per day, to irrigate the world’s golf courses
23 – Number of golf courses in Japan before World War II
3,030 – Number in operation or soon to open in 2004
8.2 kg – Average amount of pesticides used per acre, per year, on golf courses (18.0 lbs), compared to just 2.7 kg (1.2 kg) used in the same time and space for agriculture (667% difference)
6,500 cubic metres (6.5 million litres) – Amount of water used by 60,000 villagers in Thailand, on average, per day, or one golf course in Thailand, on average, per day
150,000 acres – Current area of the wetlands of the Colorado River Delta, which now receives just 0.1 percent of the river water that once flowed through it, or the area that could be covered to a depth of 2 feet with water drawn from the Colorado River by the city of Las Vegas, which uses much of that allotment to water its more than 60 golf courses
Don’t forget all the travel, whether vacation or golf carts, involved and the emissions from it!
Really, is golf really worth all that?
Sure, the golf fanatics would say yes. But what if I were to tell you some other sport had that impact? Or every other sport out there had it since why put it on just one sport? Would you allow people to play that sport then?
But on the golf balls pollution issue, UK law maker Patrick Harvie had this advice:
“Keep your balls on the fairway or invest in a stock of biodegradable balls.”
This is Hugh Laurie of( Dr. Gregory) House M.D. fame, singing a comedic song, Mystery, during a June 2006 appearance on Inside the Actor’s Studio. The song was originally from the show A Bit of Fry and Laurie.
I’m not posting this for performance, or lyrics or musicality. Rather, I’m posting it because the way Hugh put a little acting into all the little spots in the song as if he were improvising. At various points, he pretends to struggle to come up with a rhyme, the idea for the next verse, how to manipulate a word to rhyme, making up new words, squeezing in entire phrases, etc.
What all that feels like is the struggle, and mystery, of lyric writing for songwriting. The various methods, successes and failures of “creativity” to find that elusive lyric, sometimes forced and sometimes “enlightened”, are demonstrated well, I thought. The song is simple enough you can just sit and dissect the lyrics, which are included under the video below. The tune and musical chord progressions are nice and simple, too.
Besides that, I’m not sure I can say much about the “mystery” of lyric writing. It just kind of feels this way, if you’ve never experienced it yourself.
If you have, I’d love to hear your descriptions of it. Thanks!
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Mystery
All my life has been a mystery
You and I were never ever meant to be
That’s why I call my love for you a mystery
Different country
You and I have always lived in a different country
And I know that airline tickets don’t grow on a tree
So what kept us apart is plain (plane?) for me to see
That much at least is not really a mystery
Estuary
I live in a houseboat on an estuary
Which is handy for my work with the Port Authority
But I know you would have found it insanitary
Insanitary
Hated me
I’d be foolish to ignore the possibility
That if we’d ever actually met, you might have really taken a violent dislike to me
Still, that’s not the only problem that I can see
Dead since 1993
You’ve been dead now . . . wait a minute, let me see…
Fourteen years come next Jan-uary
As a human being you are history
So why do I still long for you?
Why is my love so strong for you?
Why did I write this song for you?
Well, I guess it’s just a mystery
No, but that’s why I have them! These are also available in my 1920 x 1200 pixels size collection (down-sized from these originals, not the other way around).
I know a lot of these wallpapers aren’t ideal because they are on white backgrounds instead of something darker or fancier, but I did it for a few reasons.
You can view the Transformers in more detail than in most other places you would have seen them.
You can easily crop out what you want for your own art work or design!
If you want to put these Transformers on black or other backgrounds, you go for it. It takes me too long to do it clean and well, as I had tried with Devastator. I thought it was the easiest to do given it doesn’t have all the light greys similar to the other Transformers, blending in with the pure white background. It still took me a while, with the many “holes” in the complex robot being tedious to fill with quality so the edges weren’t rough.
Come back in November and I’ll have some more added which will just have robots without names and insignia.
Other size wallpapers can be found at the links below. The smaller sizes have many more options as big files can always be converted to smaller ones, but smaller ones can’t be made into much bigger ones than their original sizes.
1920 x 1200 pixels (also good for 1680 x 1050, 1280 x 800 and 960 x 600 pixel monitors)
Christina MacFarlane of CNN reports that 300 million balls are lost or discarded in the United States every year! There were no numbers for world estimates, but you can bet it’s a lot because there are a lot of countries in which golf is being played. I think double the 300 million, would be a conservative estimate. The US might like to play “us versus the world” in those team golf tournaments like the 
This is 
Digital Citizen 