Here is a Happy Earth Day song for you to sing to anybody you like!
The tune is set to Happy Birthday with Earth Day being a natural rhyme for birthday (no pun intended on natural). If you are not familiar with the tune (cause maybe you’re not familiar with English or English speaking culture that sings this), just play the video below of Ernie singing it to the letter U on Sesame Street. However, I suggest slowing it down a bit. Put a little drama and vibrato into it. And maybe jazz it up a little bit.
Happy Earth Day to you,
Happy Earth Day to you,
Happy Earth Day dear …
Happy Earth Day to you!
What are you going to do,
To keep sea and sky blue,
To reduce your C-O-2,
To be green the year through?
I made my Earth Day pledge yesterday. Will you be making one and, if so, what?
Note: Since this posting, I have evolved Facebook picture tagging memes on my own ideas far beyond this concept I saw. My ideas involve real world and life actions rather than just associating ideas. They are listed under the Action memescategory, involving what I call Facebook 2.0 tagging memes.
The pictorial Facebook tagging memes that have been going around in many variations seems to have evolved into that common high school year book feature, the Most Likely To… page. I saw one just hours ago, but it was so poorly done (mostly due to almost unreadable small type) I went and created my own, text, picture compilation and all. Here’s how to get it:
Click on the picture below to get it at full size.
Right click on that picture and save to your computer.
Daniel J. Levitin wrote an absolutely brilliant book called The World in Six Songs, supported by a great website with the many music samples referenced, among other great related material.
My basic paraphrasing of the concept is this. All the songs in the world could be fit into at least one of six categories providing an evolutionary benefit to humanity, often ultimately tied to our social nature.
The book and website offer far more detailed interpretations, of course, but I will expand on my paraphrasing with each post and the associated topic.
In a series of posts, I will describe each of the six categories in brief, one at a time:
I will describe what the categories are about because they are not as limited in scope as the category names suggest. I will then supply one of my choices and ask all readers to do the same if they so wish. In the seventh post of the series, I will offer the chance to put the song choices all together so readers can read the entire set on one post. I do this because it would be a long post to describe all six categories at once, but to have all the answers in one place might be nice.
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This post focuses on Songs of Friendship
July 30th add-on in italics, from Dan Levitin in a summary article
Friendship songs centre around group cohesion, whether it be for war, or the bonding of different cliques in high school. For example, in prehistoric warfare, attackers would sometimes ambush another tribe using loud instruments (especially drums) to surprise the targets while they were still sleeping. Countertactics employing the use of singing may also have been used as a signal that the group was awake. These songs serve to protect a tribe/group or succeed in the takeover of another. In the context of social groups, they provide a sense of community and belonging, bringing people together.
These songs serve the purpose of bringing people together to promote cooperation in one form or another in order to survive, or at least make life more tolerable. Applied to various situations, cooperation could promote any of these situations:
Working together
Attacking/defending together
Supporting each other
Friendship
Averting conflict
Forging group identity (maybe not formally but like a bonding anthem for a group of “outcasts”)
Others
The evolutionary value is that humans interact socially, whether in friendly or destructive ways. If we can avoid the latter, like in wars, we are more likely to survive and thrive as a species. Our social bonds are essential to our well-being, and we do survive and thrive better in groups, so anything that helps us in these causes are beneficial to our evolution as a species.
Audio sample of songs from the Friendship chapter in The World in Six Songs can be found on the website. No direct link was available, but click on the Songs menu option and appropriate page number range link carrying pages 41 to 82. Please note that not all songs are meant as samples of Friendship songs. Some are just referenced material in the book text.
It fits into the Friendship subcategory of various bonding purposes, but I do believe that true friends ultimately help each other. There isn’t any other song I know and feel tells someone they’ve got a true friend better than this Carole King song. Nobody sings it better, either!
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What is your choice for Song of Friendship?
Please leave your choice as a comment.
Lyrics and YouTube/audio link would greatly enhance your answer so readers can know more about your choice. They are not necessary, though, and not possible if no lyrics or version exist.
Here are some more Facebook tagging meme pictures I haven’t been able to find anywhere else easily, so I’ve put them on my blog. I created the Family Guy version, with relatively few characters compared to others I created thus far. However, I was only able to find graphics of those 8 characters with white backgrounds and that’s enough work to assemble them, label them and such for me on one post. It’s for the Family Guy fans, which I don’t think are quite at the level of the other meme themes (see links below), but I’ll let the download stats speak for themselves. It’s also for people who don’t have time to tag 25 people, or daring ones who not only have their family as friends, particular Parents, but will also tag them! This is also the first time I created a pictorial Facebook meme with personality traits rather than straight character names.
The other two meme pictures here are Disney characters and Penguins (somebody need to enlighten me on the cartoon franchise from which they came). The first penguins version I created. The others I only slightly optimized ratios and edited out one extreme expletive that was simply gratuitous, and it wasn’t even funny. I’m glad someone did the personality labeling for Disney characters because I sure didn’t want to try. I had thought about a Disney set but passed it up due to too many characters without prominent distinguishing personality traits. As for the Penguins set, not knowing anything about it really, it’s just included. Here’s how you get any of these graphics for Facebook:
Click on the picture below to get it at full size.
Right click on that picture and save to your computer.
In a series of posts, I will describe each of the six categories in brief, one at a time:
Digital Citizen 