Lyrics – Page 6

Hang up the Translation Habit

Well I finally managed to track down the lyrics to Laisse Tomber les Filles by Fabienne Del Sol. The trick of course was just to search merely for the song title, not for the song title plus ‘Fabienne Del Sol’ – as it turns out it’s a cover of a (seemingly) quite well known song. Or at least there seem to be dozens of recordings of it by various artists stretching back to the 50’s.

So now I have my lyrics, and can happily sing along whenever it comes on the radio. Or at least I could if I knew how to pronounce French. I’m quite sure that French spelling is fairly straightforward and logical but being poisoned with insane English spelling from birth my brain just refuses to see how Je dirai c’est bien fait pour toi, Je dirai ça t’apprendra could possibly come out as “Zher deela sev ya papal twa, Zher delyes satep onwa”. Actually, despite being no expert in French, I suspect Fabienne may be slurring her words a bit. Not that I care, it still sounds great.

One thing I was unable to track down however was an English translation. Or at least I could track down the lyrics of an English cover – but the author had clearly decided to just take the title of the song (“Drop the Girls”) and write some completely new words around that theme to fit the tune, resulting in a song called “Hang up the Chick Habit”. This is eminently sensible – translating lyrics from one language to another isn’t that hard, but trying to maintain meter, syllabylisation (is that even a word?), and rhyme is a nightmare – but it wasn’t what I was looking for.

So, for my own edification and amusement I decided to prepare my own translation (with the assistance of Babelfish). It doesn’t attempt to be singable – just to give an idea of what the song is actually about. So, without further ado I present Give up the Girls (which has to sound less dated than Hang up the Chick Habit at least…)

Give up the Girls

A hasty and somewhat dubious English translation of the French song Laisse Tomber les Filles

Give up the girls,
Give up the girls,
One day one is going to leave you,
Give up the girls,
Give up the girls,
One day you’ll be the one to cry,
Yes I cried, but not today,
No I won’t cry,
No I won’t cry,
I’ll say that you deserve it,
I’ll say that’ll teach you,
I’ll say that’ll teach you,

Give up the girls,
Give up the girls,
The ones you play cruel tricks on*This line could actually be “The ones that play cruel tricks on you“, but given the tone of the rest of the verse I decided to go with this lyric until someone tells me otherwise 🙂,
Give up the girls,
Give up the girls,
You will pay one of these days,
One does not play with impunity,
With an innocent heart,
With an innocent heart,
You will see what I mean,
Before very long,
Before very long,

The chance gives up,
That which does not know,
That to leave the wounded hearts*I can make neither head nor tail of these three lines, so leave them as Babelfish translated them in the hopes that readers smarter than me can make some sense out of them.,
You won’t have anyone,
To comfort you,
You will not have stolen it*Another line I’m confused about 🙂,

Give up the girls,
Give up the girls,
One day one is going to leave you,
Give up the girls,
Give up the girls,
One day you’ll be the one to cry,
To feel sorry for you there will be,
No one but yourself,
No one but yourself,
Then you will remember,
All that I told you,
All that I told you,

Then you will remember,
All that I told you,
All that I told you,

A break from all the deranged screeding :)

As observant readers may have noticed I’ve made a few changes around the place over the last few days. For instance rather than just redirecting to Space Net, www.wyrmworld.com is now a domain in it’s own right (finally). Which explains why the page you’re reading with your grape-like eyes now has a URL of www.wyrmworld.com/wyrmlog/. No more frames or redirects or other stupidity, hooray!! 🙂

This sudden change is down to the fact that I finally got around to getting the server guys to set me up some webspace on the company server. Free, quota unlimited company webspace! Hmmm, I suppose I’ve really got a good reason not to get fired now huh? Well, as opposed to not getting paid any more obviously.

In any case over the coming weeks Wyrmworld will gradually migrate it’s way over to the new address, leaving nothing but a horde of redirect pages and dead links over on Space Net. Then after a while I can look at dumping them completely and getting an ADSL account with someone else – if I decide that it’s worthwhile that is, which it probably will be.

Oh, and of course I’ll be setting up some new email accounts (probably this week) then dropping my old spam riddled space.net email like a gun. I’ll also be doing my best to keep my new address completely off the web – thus avoiding the spam issue completely. I hope 🙂

Anyway I’ve also been making some changes to the Wyrmlog itself, as can be seen by the large white boxes down there. Inspired by something I saw on someone else’s blog (sadly I can’t remember who or I’d give them full credit) I’ve set up some funky looking styles for quoting with.

For instance, if I wanted to quote from a book I’d use my new quoteBook style. Let’s say for the sake of argument I was quoting Steven Pile’s Book of Heroic Failures I would do it thusly…

Few broadcasters have given more unalloyed pleasure than Lieutenant Commander Tommy Woodroofe. He leapt to public prominence with his now famous commentary on the illumination of the fleet at Spithead in 1937.

Before the broadcast the Commander had joined in celebrations with slightly too much enthusiasm. The result was an exquisitely incoherent talk punctuated by pauses of anything up to eleven seconds.

And were I to quote the good Commander himself I’d use the quoteQuote style (for quoting things people actually said)…

At the present moment, the whole fleet is lit up. When I say ‘lit up’ I mean lit up by fairy lamps. It’s fantastic. It isn’t a fleet at all. It’s just… It’s fairyland. The whole fleet is in fairyland. Now if you’ll follow me through … if you don’t mind … the next few moments you’ll find the fleet doing odd things.

[lengthy pause]

I’m sorry I was telling some people to shut up talking.

[The fleet turn off their lights to shoot rockets]

It’s gone! It’s gone! There’s no fleet! It’s… It’s disappeared! No magician who could ever have waved his wand could have waved it with more acumen than he has now at the present moment. The fleet’s gone. It’s disappeared.

[pause]

I was talking to you in the middle of this damn [cough] in the middle of this fleet and what’s happened is the fleet’s gone and disappeared and gone…

ANNOUNCER: That is the end of the Spithead Commentary.

[Half hour of unscheduled dance music]

Or maybe I wanted to quote a website, then quoteWeb would be employed…

When the English ships full of troops were in sight, a foppish tart by the name of Paul Revere rode through all the towns screaming at the top of his lungs until he was arrested by the constable for disturbing the peace, and is remembered by the Beastie Boys song of the same name.

— www.somethingawful.com

If the web was a Blog, then of course quoteBlog would be appropriate…

I can’t really think of anything to blog about, it’s not like I’ve been doing anything exciting. Maybe I should do something exciting. I can’t even think of anything exciting to do though, can’t be bothered, oh well, I’ll stick with the apathay and general laying around playing on the computer.

— Ali

Lyrics have the special quoteMusic class…

Arrivederci – by Shivaree

Arrivederci I’m cutting my hair,
Tell Fish and Tracy the weather’s fair,
Been eleven hours we’re on a dare,
Arrivederci to my old chair,

I’ve been told that the old who bargain and save,
They get sold for the gold on the little kings grave,
So goodbye to screamers and goodnight Irene,
A salty whisker won’t hurt anything,

…and so on and so on. Obviously I’ve gotten way too carried away with this, but what’s new? 🙂

Next on the agenda is getting those pop-up comments to work again. I’m trying to think of a new and funky way to do this that doesn’t rely on opening new windows and such – ideally a tooltip kind of thing. I’ve got a few ideas but need to develop them fully.

Then I guess I’ll come up with a nicely styled replacement for the old music and reading sections. Oh, and the links to other people’s blogs I suppose which should really be a much higher priority because after all they’re linking to me aren’t they? Or they were last time I checked.

Hmmm, never ends does it?

Oh well, back to transcribing the deranged Foxtel related ravings of that guy on the train I guess…

Actually hang on, I must mention a great link Stephanie put me onto. It’s a page that displays the last 30 images uploaded to liveJournal…

http://www.dreamwill.net/ljimages.php

It’s a magical gateway into the human peepshow that is the web! 🙂

(It should be noted that people upload all sorts of stuff onto liveJournal, including porn and – even worse – 30 meg digital photos of inane things like sports cars and 1930’s telephones that hog your bandwidth to the exclusion of everything else until they’ve fully downloaded – so be warned! 🙂

OK, really going now.

Got to feet?

It has come to my attention recently that after a long period of no lyrics being available at all for Shivaree’s song Scrub the net is suddenly flooded with them. I’d say this is good news, except for the fact that…

They all seem to have been copied from one source,
That source is somewhat dodgy.

I’d guess that someone put a lot of time and effort into transcribing the song. For the most part this has paid off, but there are one or two lines that are just blech. I mean “So small and sad you’re a skit“? What?! This cannot be allowed to stand.

So, here I present my version of the lyrics. Ones that make sense. Well, OK it’s Shivaree so it doesn’t make a huge amount of sense, but it makes a good deal more than the other versions floating ’round the net…

Scrub
by Shivaree

On the way coming up,
I’m quiet as a cup,
Be a girl anyway,
Close enough,

In your life,
Such a mess,
So small inside your skin¹,
Got some time on the hand,
On the cast there’s no love,

No, only proof,
Of love this is the truth,
So I’ll drop my hand,
Think it’s you²,

You’re on the club,
Got two feet as they fall³,
Dropped on the bed⁴,
A spinning head love,

Now, keep the score⁵,
Like a baby tallies war⁶,
Adam should have just stepped on the snake⁷,

Naughty boys try to come,
But the best ones always go,
Say goodbye with a smile,
And they spoke there’s no love,

No, only proof,
Of love this is the truth,
So I’ll drop my hand,
Think it’s you²,

You’re on the club,
Got two feet as they fall³,
Dropped on the bed⁴,
A reeling f**king stone block,

Now, keep the score⁵,
Like a baby tallies war⁶,
Adam should have just stepped on the snake,

Adam should have just stepped on,
Adam should have just stepped,
Adam should have just stepped on the snake,

This line may be “So small and sad you’re a skit” as suggested in the commonly posted lyrics (CPL), but I doubt it. It doesn’t fit the meter and it makes no freakin’ sense. I’m pretty confident “So small inside your skin” is the correct lyric.
The CPL has “Look at you” for this line, but I’m not convinced. Neither am I totally convinced of my interpretation, but I think it’s closer than “Look at you”. (‘Pikachu’ is even closer but I’m not even going to think about that! 😉
The CPL has “Got to feet” here which is just stupid. It would have to be “Got two feet”. Equally likely is “Got to feed”.
This line could equally as well be “Trapped on the bed”, but I’ve left it as “Dropped” to tie in with “fall” from the previous line.
The first word of this line is so muffled that it’s impossible to even take a stab at what it might be. “Now” is as good a guess as any.
The CPL has “Like a baby tell his war”. The only explanation I can offer for this is that the transcriber is unfamilar with the verb “tallies”.
This line is definitely correct, however I spent a long time thinking it was “Adam sure, I’ll just stand on the snake” which kind of puts a different spin on the whole song eh? 🙂

So, one more abuse of the musical arts corrected. Now if only I can smuggle a rifle into that Shannon Noll concert… 🙂

Back at Work. Bah!

Being back at work sucks.

I narrowly missed out on an extremely embarrassing encounter on the train home on Thursday night. There I was, walking down the platform after getting out of the front carriage, when who should I spy, sitting in the rear carriage(The electric trains in Perth only have two carriages. Or four in really busy periods, but that’s really just two trains end to end.) but Lyndah (Her hair is currently dyed flame red, so she’s pretty hard to miss ;-)).

You know, Lyndah?

Yeah. She didn’t see me, or if she did she did (she did she did? That can’t be good English!) a very good job of pretending she didn’t. And I doubt she would have spotted me down the length of the train since she was right at the back. But of course this little incident raises the question of what would have happened had we ended up on the same carriage and she had seen me (I know what would have happened if I’d seen her. I would have turned as red as a lobster and concealed myself behind some large fellow commuter before scurrying out like a rat when the train got to my station :)).

It’s a very good question.

The hidden variable of course is whether she’s aware of what I wrote about her. I have no reason to suppose that she’s ever visited my website or this blog, but she could have been made aware of the salient facts by my brother, which would provide a very good reason for her to pretend not to see me under any circumstances, let alone a train 🙂

The problem of course is that I don’t know if my brother reads this blog either. In fact I only know of a few people who do read it, Helen, Ali, Stephanie, Rebecca and Ryan (and maybe Mark, in between all that police training). Of course there’s also all those people who wander in looking for the lyrics to the Drug’s The Bold and the Beautiful or after searching for “Billy Idol Religious Fanatics” (I’m not kidding. Two separate search engine queries over the last few months. The scary thing is not so much that people are searching for this, but that I keep coming up for it :)). But I don’t know about anyone else.

So, regard this as an invitation everyone. If you read the Wyrmlog, let me know! Drop me an email! You’re my audience after all!

I’ll get all depressed if you don’t 😉

(By the way, please note that this is not an invitation to send me offers for herbal viagra, discount ink cartridges, penis enlargement pills, human growth hormone, millions of dollars in unclaimed African slush funds or any other such crap. I have excellent spam filtering software and I use it, so your message will be bloody well bounced.)

Anyway, back to Lyndah. I naturally kept half an eye out for her on Friday, but there wasn’t a flash of sexy flame red hair to be seen. Which is probably a good thing all round. I can seriously do without the distraction 🙂

Anyway, on a completely different subject a fair few people have been visiting the Wyrmlog looking for the lyrics to 77% by The Herd. Since I’ve been looking for them myself and the only copy I can find online is woefully inadequate I figured I’d transcribe them and stick them up here. So (with all necessary language warnings) here they are. Enjoy…

77% – The Herd

(samples)

…seventy seven percent of Australians, um, agree with John Howard’s actions on the Tampa.
What happened to the others?..

…the thing is, to use military force, uh, against, uh refugees, isn’t that a little, overkill?..

…a spokesman for the line that owns the ship says Australian SAS Troops are in danger of breaking the laws of piracy…

…undoubtedly this is the most popular decision as far as the Australian public are concerned, the Government’s made during its reign…

…the Captain before entering Australian waters had sent out a distress signal…

…clearly our solution was um, well it wasn’t only farcical – it was um, immoral…

(John Howard) I wish, that this problem were not ours…

Well I’m left sitting here, staring into a beer,
Shaking my head at the same old loathing and fear,
Stranger in my own land, can’t understand,
How the very word ‘Australian’ has just been damned,
I f*****g hate myself, take Aussie from my name,
Erase this endless shame, forever casting blame,
If you don’t act the same will I destroy you?
Everyone looks the same beaten black and blue,

And so I’ve had enough of these redneck pricks,
When fact is the only real s**t that sticks,
Watch as I tear the very skin from my face,
So none’ll see my race, my deep disgrace,
You’re not even from here in the first place!
And those who are you wanna further debase?
Nup – no more – never again, whether by fist or pen,
I will defend – ’cause I’m at a loose end,

The shattered remnants of Aussie dignity,
I’m a skip, whitey, round eye, surprise me,
Use your shriveled brain to please explain,
How the clever country just went down the drain?
We rode the sheep’s back now the sheep ride you,
If this is how it’s gonna be don’t call me true blue,
I denounce my ancestors, wounds still fester,
If you say it ain’t so I suggest ya wake up!

Wake up! This country needs a f*****g shake up!
Wake up! These c***s need a shake up,
Wake up! This country needs a f*****g shake up!
Wake up! These c***s need a shake up,
Wake up! This country needs a f*****g shake up!
Wake up! These c***s need a shake up,
Wake up! This country needs a f*****g shake up!
Wake up!

Talkback? Squawking hacks, won’t relax,
Until Jonesey, Zemanek and Laws are all axed,
Seventy-seven percent of Aussies are racist,
If you’re here – I’ll say it your faces,
Rich redneck pricks still hold all the aces,
I’ll buy you a beer – with a arsenic chaser,
Better off dead? Is that what I’ve said?
Tempting to take for all the blood you’ve shed,

No doubt you’re as bad as your dads and your mums,
Mainsteam media making me so f*****g bummed,
Anglo reality, intellectual cavity,
Channel Nine fostering prejudiced mentalities,
I won’t be a casualty, just mention casually,
I can’t stand for you s**t-eating bullies,
Preying on peeps without a mainstream voice,
Most of yous stay silent but I’ve got no choice,

Wake up! This country needs a f*****g shake up!
Wake up! These c***s need a shake up!
Wake up! This country needs a f*****g shake up!
Wake up! These c***s need a shake up!
Wake up! This country needs a f*****g shake up!
Wake up! These c***s need a shake up!
Wake up! This country needs a f*****g shake up!
Wake up!

Well I’ve yelled my lungs out, but to no avail,
Well I’ve yelled my lungs out, but to no avail,
Well I’ve yelled my lungs out, but to no f*****g avail,
That you’re a stranger yourself, now that’s the sting in the tail,

Captain Cook was the very first queue jumper,
It was immigrant labour that made Australia plumper,
Enough is enough, whiteys go pack your stuff,
Don’t wanna live in England? That’s f*****g tough!
I’m sick and tired of this redneck wonderland,
Most of yous stay silent and I can’t understand,
I just can’t understand,
It’s time for you to,

Well that’s a cheery way to sign off isn’t it? 🙂

Snow!

I am shocked. Shocked and appalled.

Every Thursday morning on Triple J they have a sing-a-long. They choose a song on the Wednesday morning, put the lyrics on the Breakfast Show website, and then at 6:30 the next day play it, so people around the nation can join in. This week the song was Informer by early 90’s white boy Canadian rapper Snow.

All well and good. Except I went to the site to check out the lyrics and well, I don’t know where they got them from, but they’re ridiculously wrong!

For instance, they claim the chorus goes…

Informer,
You no say daddy me Snow me I’ll go blame,
A licky boom boom down,
Detective mon said daddy me Snow me stab someone down the lane,
A licky boom boom down,

When everyone knows it goes…

Informer,
You know say diddly sonne I go blam,
A leque boom boom Deanne,
Take the money siddly sonne somme dat,
Slumber down éan,
A leque boom boom Deanne,

And the first verse goes…

Police adumuno commie now they blow down me door,
Bring the capacho to me window,
So then they put me in the botte car at the station,
From that point on I reach me destination,
And the destination is banana east detention,
Where they whipped down me pants look up me bottom,

Not…

Police them come an’ now they blow down me door,
One him come crawl through through my window,
So then they put me in the back the car at the station,
From that point on me reach my destination,
When the destination reached it was the east detention,
Where them whipped down me pants looked up me bottom,

I can understand how they might think their version makes more “sense”, but the fact is that Snow, being a good Canadian, raps at least half of the song in Quebecoi French. Trying to interpret these French bits as English just leads to misunderstandings. I mean, which is a more intreaging and enduring image? A policeman crawling through your window, or a policeman bringing a “capacho” (a tasty Latin American foodstuff) to your window? And the sheer poetry of “A leque boom boom Deanne” beats out the inanity of “A licky boom boom down” any day.

Shame Triple J! Shame! ;-D