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Peak Amusing Pixel Disagreement: The Top 25 Opening Riffs in Christendom

August 28, 2025 22 Comments

Well, I sorta put my foot in it on Tuesday. I called the opening bars of I’ll Be Around by the Spinners among the 25 most recognizable riffs in Christendom. This led to an internet argument. This is my favorite kind of argument. Internet arguments are so bitter because the stakes are so small. Someone named Hitler even showed up in the comments. When the brushy mustache guy is mentioned in any capacity, you know you’ve reached peak amusing pixel disagreement.

Now, I’ve mentioned Christendom here, which is a geographic term, really. This makes sense in my disordered mind. I’m really talking about American pop culture. Since American pop culture has entirely taken over what’s left of Christendom, except for the parts of France where it’s drowned out by the muezzins, let’s roll with it.

Now, people are going to mention the most recognizable intros to them. This is a bit of a category error. I’m looking for the opening stanzas of pop hits that would be recognized instantly by the largest slice of lowbrow humanity. I won’t be including Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, or anything numbered and opused and so forth. As a matter of fact, to simplify it, I’m going to specify the years from 1960 to 2000. Everything since 2000 has been churned out of an audio sausage machine, so it’s pointless to argue about it. Everything before 1960 is bound to be Greek to generations that don’t read cursive.

Now some ground rules. They’re mostly for myself. Everyone else can do as they please in the comments, but this is how I played it. First, no artist(s) gets more than one entry. The Beatles and the Stones, for instance, have beaucoup candidates for a list like this, so I chose one each. Secondly, the list is 25 entries. If you want to add something, it’s gotta bump something off. This lends an amusing knife-fight vibe to the proceedings, which I’ve always enjoyed. But remember: no wagering. And thirdly, this is not a list of songs I like. I once played in a band that held a little contest in the middle of our shows. We’d play just the opening bars of songs like these, stop, and ask the audience to identify it. We learned very quickly what songs everyone knew, and which songs had one guy way in the back who yelled Green Eyed Lady! while everyone else scratched their heads.

Also, certain songs are verboten to the list. These include any riff currently banned in musical instrument stores. There is no point in mentioning Stairway to Heaven, Hotel California, Smoke on the Water, Freebird, or something by Kansas. The opening riff should make the largest number of people yell, “Hell, yeah,” not groan. I’m also leaving Layla off the list. The opening riff might qualify, but Martin Scorsese only used the piano outro, and we will too. It’s music to see bodies tumbling out of a trash truck now, not whining about George Harrison’s first wife any longer.

The list is in no particular order, but that absolute winner is listed last:

  • I Can See Clearly Now — Johnny Nash
  • I Want You Back — Jackson 5
  • Long Cool Woman — The Hollies
  • Brown Eyed Girl — Van Morrison
  • Go All the Way — The Raspberries
  • My Girl — The Temptations
  • Sweet Home Alabama — Lynyrd Skynyrd
  • Guns N’ Roses – Sweet Child O’ Mine
  • The Beatles – Day Tripper
  • Nirvana – Smells Like Teen Spirit
  • It Don’t Come Easy — Ringo Starr
  • Stayin’ Alive — Bee Gees
  • Green Onions  – Booker T. & the MG’s
  • Doobie Brothers – Listen To The Music
  • Fortunate Son  – Creedence Clearwater Revival
  • Brown Sugar — Rolling Stones
  • Surfin’ U.S.A. — Beach Boys
  • La Grange — ZZ Top
  • Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) — Sly & The Family Stone
  • Rikki Don’t Lose That Number — Steely Dan
  • Super Freak — Rick James
  • Come And Get Your Love — Redbone
  • That Lady, Pts. 1 & 2 –The Isley Brothers
  • Blister In The Sun — Violent Femmes

And the absolute Number One slot on our top 25?

Whiter Shade of Pale — Procol Harum

I’ll tell you why you’ll never be able to bump this from the top spot. Opening riffs? There can be only one. The fellow playing the original organ melody, Matthew Fisher, didn’t write the song. Gary Brooker and Keith Reid did. So forty years or so later, Fisher sued, and said the song wasn’t nothing without his organ riff, and he wanted the credit. He wanted 50% of the songwriting royalties. He won the case, but they only gave him 40%. Brooker appealed, and Fisher kinda lost that one. The 40% held, but not retroactively. Then the House of Lords took it up, and said he should have his 40%, and retroactively too.

When your selection for intro riff is adjudicated by the House of Lords, you can bump A Whiter Shade of Pale off the top spot, but not before.

Upside Down Soul

August 26, 2025 10 Comments

I’d rank the guitar intro in the top 25 most recognizable riffs in Christendom. Maybe higher. That’s the antipodean Hindley Street Country Club  taking a crack at it. I guess they’re just a cover band, but up several notches from the usual.

I was tempted to paste the Detroit Spinners original here. It was a million-seller in 1972. All the vids of the Spinners on Soul Train and Don Kirshner’s Rock Concert and similar shows are all lip synched. The band does their steps, and generally look genial, but I’d have preferred something fresh.

It’s understandable. Back then, the audiences just wanted to hear their favorite songs without waiting for the top of the hour over and over on the Top 40 stations. They might revolt if it didn’t sound just like the record. People are more interested in different versions of things these days, I think. It comes from having pretty much all forms of entertainment at your fingertips at all times. Something new sticks out.

The framework of the song lends itself to various permutations of it. This is my favorite bent version of it:

The original song was used to great effect as the outro for the movie Roman J. Israel, Esq., a very underrated movie:

I’ll be skippin’ and a-jumpin’, indeed.

Chad Is Smarter Than Your Average Internaut

August 25, 2025 3 Comments

By “Chad,” I’m refering to Chat GPT, or any of the other goofy AI apps available from every digital so-and-so on the planet these days.

Sippican Cottage is not a heavily traveled website in the scheme of things. My niche is being pleasant, more or less, and the audience for that is vanishingly small on the intertunnel, and getting smaller all the time. Que sera sera.

This website if very popular with bots, however. I block many of them, but it’s essentially impossible to get them all without blocking lots of regular people in the dragnet. And boy, do the bots misbehave. They occasionally hit the server so frequently that they amount to a Denial of Service attack. I have lots of bandwidth, but it’s an annoyance. The only bot from any of the big search engines that actually behaves itself is Yandex, which is a Russian bot. I have no idea why that’s so.

But the preponderance of bad bots these days are AI bots. There are many, many of them, and not just the ones you’ve heard of. Lots of mid-tier companies are assembling their own slopbots, I gather. They scrape the intertunnels willy-nilly, because they can. I thought you’d like to see what the end result of their scraping and reassembling the internet looks like, from someone who notices such things. Let’s start here:

I saw the following on somebody’s Fumblr page. I didn’t save the link, but it really doesn’t matter. Fumblr is Lord of the Flies for copyright anyway. Besides, I’m pretty certain the image isn’t copyrightable. Why? I’d bet folding money Chad made it. Viz.:

Most social media feeds like Fumblr and Instahole are aspirational.

Aspirational, sure. They are of course also full of merde. People are trying to project an image of a lifestyle or a vibe that they’ll never achieve, mostly because they’re not really trying to attain it in the first place. Their aspirations are strictly of the Potemkin variety. For example, Americana+ is always showing pictures of posh island getaways, top-shelf arm candy, and mixed drinks (mixed by someone else, natch). The website is harmless, I’m not bagging on them. In their mind they’re only posting pleasant things, which is rare enough on the intertunnel. But I always picture the proprietors living in a trailer park somewhere with a lot of skewed Live Laugh Love signs on the wall over their particle board kitchen table, with scads of Olive Garden coupons scattered around, and empty Natty Ice cans lined up on the windowsills.

I once saw a picture on their Fumblr page of a river scene, taken in autumn, with the leaves scattering their golden and scarlet casualties on the water. Quite scenic. Aspirational image, I guess. The problem with that sort of aspiration is that more information can ruin it. I recognized the exact spot. The picture was taken almost directly behind my ramshackle house, in my (former) walking-on-its-uppers town, within shouting distance of a reeking paper mill. If you aspired to live there, you certainly could have. That house cost the same as a used Kia. But reality doesn’t intrude much on these here aspirational intertunnels.

Back to our image. I instantly recognized the image when I saw it. That’s not to say it’s simply cut and pasted from elsewhere. It is a shade, a doppelganger of something familiar. It was recognizable, like a message being shouted underwater. I knew it was made by some form of Chad, and from what materials.

Here’s a picture I took and posted here of a real, live Mexican cantina, back in March:

One of the reasons Chad likes Sippican Cottage so much is that despite my loopy writing style and generous sprinkling of fart jokes, there’s rather a lot of information on the pages. You certainly can find a lot more pictures of the places we visited in Mexico on other people’s feeds, but I’ll bet no one has more descriptive text.

So I put the first image into Tineye, to see if I could find where it came from, but it had only one hit. Now it will have two, I guess. I think someone put “Draw me an illustration of a Mexican Cantina” into Chad, and got that back. Let’s look at them side by each, as they say in Woonsocket:

C’mon, man. The proportions of the doorframes, the height of the rusticated plinths, gray in one, red in the other, but the same proportions. Never mind that. Look at the sign that reads “CANTINA” over the door. Same font, same kerning. They’re both on a block background. The left-hand leg of the A and the right-hand leg of the N align with the outside edges of the doorframes perfectly. Even the angle of the wall itself is the same. I took the picture while standing in the street, and the building is raised on a sidewalk base, making it seem to lean back in the snapshot. They both do.

So that’s what Chad does. It learns things. It knows what a cantina doorway looks like, because people like me told him (it) what it looks like. It throws up a different set of swinging doors, but the swinging doors are at the same height. It knows that red and gold is a very popular color scheme down there, so it tosses it in. You can see the hinge-butt edge of the doors in my photo, so Chad shows them closed, and found the right sort of door to display. It’s a good representation of the thing, without being the thing.

I also figure that  Chad did it, because Tineye hasn’t referenced my image yet, but all the various Chads have crawled it lots of times already:

So what’s it all mean? Well, let me put it like this: People almost unanimously reject the “intelligence” part of “artificial intelligence” when it’s mentioned. Everyone says that all the various Chads are dumb, because they’re able to ask it dumb questions, and get dumb answers in return. All I know is that Chad is intelligent enough to trust what I publish on the internet. It trusts it enough to transmogrify it into something similar, a dispositive image of a thing,while very few real people are intelligent enough to even look at it in the first place. Case closed. Chad might be dumb, but it’s smarter than an average person on the internet.

Ya Can’t Have Too Many Mooses. Mooseses. Meece. Whatever

August 23, 2025 5 Comments

I posted this about fifteen years ago. So sue me. I think that moose are pretty interesting animals. They ain’t pretty, but they are pretty interesting. I don’t know why, but I remember their scientific name: alces alces. A moose is just the biggest kind of deer, when you get right down to it. And by big, I mean 1,500 pounds big, occasionally. Tall, too. Sometimes 7 foot at the shoulder. That’s why you don’t want to run into a moose on the highway. It’s lethal to the moose, but it’s a suicide pact with anyone in the front seats, too. The vehicle hits their legs, and the moose’s big ol’ body flops right in through the windshield. It’s about the same as having a Harley thrown at you.

Like most of the more intelligent animals, they eventually figure out that the weird pink creatures mean them no harm, and let them poke at them without taking too much umbrage. Some animals can even remember a kindness done to them. Your house cat, can, for instance. It doesn’t cut any ice with them, but they do remember it.

A Modest Proposal on Immigration

August 22, 2025 4 Comments

I think we should let any Mexican who wishes to come to the United States and live here to do so. I like Mexicans a lot, and wouldn’t mind more of them here in the US. And I don’t think they should have to swim the Rio Grande and then hide in the shadows, or at least the shadows cast by the Home Depot. I think all they should have to do is fulfill the same requirements that Americans do if they want to move to Mexico. Fair is fair.

So I looked them up. Here they are, the requirements to obtain a Temporary Residency Permit in Mexico (good for one year). As we go along, I’ll be reversing these requirements to see what would be involved if you want to come to the US from Mexico, and converting them from Mexican weights and measures (futbol) to American (football), so that there’s a fair playing field:

  • Valid Passport

You’re going to have to show both the original, and supply a copy. It’s got to be valid for at least 6 more months. You’ll need additional recent passport-sized photos, too, in color, front view, with a white background, and no glasses.

  • Completed Application Form

You’ll be asked some uncomfortable questions. Have you ever been arrested? Bye bye. By the way, you have to have the form translated into Spanish if you’re entering Mexico, so turnabout is fair play. Our forms will be in English. The various consulates in the US where you apply for your permit to live in Mexico will be glad to supply you with a list of brothers-in-law translators who are qualified to perform this to their satisfaction. This approach is well known in US government offices in places like Boston, although their brothers in law are all Irish, but you get the idea.

  • Consular Interview

If you’re an American heading to Mexico, and the consulate likes all the paperwork you submitted,  this interview is conducted at a Mexican consulate in the country where you currently live, i.e.: you cannot apply for this visa while you’re in Mexico. You can get it renewed inside Mexico, but not initially granted. So to keep it even, our southern neighbors will have to queue up at the US consulates in Mexico if they want to come to the US. There are nine in Mexico, so the lines to get into one should only stretch to Belize or so. At these interviews, you can be turned down for any reason, by the way, not only because your paperwork isn’t in order, so be sure to stock up on breath mints beforehand.

  • Proof of Financial Solvency

Now we’re going to have to do some international math, so bear with me. To qualify for a Temporary Resident Permit, which will allow you to live in Mexico legally for one year, you have to prove your financial solvency in one of two ways:

  1. Monthly income. You have to show proof that you’ve earned 300 days of the Mexican daily wage every month for at least the last six months. For Americans, that would be about $4,000USD to $4,500USD a month.
  2. Savings or investments. If you can’t qualify for the monthly wage requirement, you can show proof that you’ve held 5,000 days-worth of the Mexican daily wage for at least the last 12 months. It can’t be borrowed money. Retirement funds are OK. In USD, that would be around $70,000.

OK. The US shouldn’t be so fussy. Let’s just use the same numbers. I had to look it up, but the US national minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. So that yields $58.00 per day for an 8-hour day. Let’s plug it in, and see what a Mexican would have to have burning a hole in their wallet to qualify to come to America under the same conditions:

  1. Monthly income: 300 x $58.00 equals $17,400 USD per month, for at least the last six months.
  2. Savings or investments: 5,000 x $58.00 equals $290,000 USD, held for at least the last twelve months.

Of course very few people earn the American national minimum wage. States set their own minimum wages, and they’re a lot higher. Since so many Mexicans would like to move to California, it might be fairer to use the Golden State’s minimum wage of $16.50 per hour as the base rate. So that gets us:

  1. Monthly income: 300 days x  $132.00 USD per day equals $39,600 USD per month.
  2. Savings or investments: 5,000 days x $132 per day equals $660,000 USD.

You’ll have to keep in mind that Mexico demands that the monthly income of a USian has to stay the same after you move to Mexico. You’re not allowed to work in Mexico, or have customers there. So to keep it equal for Mexicans moving to the US, which ever way they were earning their $39,600 per month in Mexico, they’re going to have to make sure that someone keeps mailing it to them after they move. You can’t take a resident’s job to earn it in Mexico, so it should be the same for the US. Your Social Security payments can count towards your income. I suspect that Mexican social security payments are less than $17,400 USD per month, but I might be wrong. The government owns the oil company down there, so maybe they’re all getting fat checks from Tio Petróleo. I am beset by doubts on that score, however.

You can skip renewing your Temporary Residency Permit for Mexico by applying right away for a permanent one. If you’re American, you’ll need to prove you earn around $6,750 per month, or have $269,300 in savings or investments to qualify. I suppose the US could just use the same numbers for incoming Mexicans, but if we were to use their own formula based on days of minimum wage, you’d need around… around…

All this arithmetic is giving me a headache. I’ll let Chad do it for us:

Plenty of movie producers make $66,000 a month, so if you want to move to L.A., I don’t see why everyone shouldn’t be required to earn that. Hell, I don’t think you should be able to move to Los Angeles from anywhere else in the US unless you have at least $2.6 million in ready cash. How else could you hope to put down first, last, and the security deposit on your rental apartment, with enough money left over to fill your car’s gas tank to escape in case the city burns down again?

So let’s stop making Mexicans run the Rio Grande Triathlon to get into the country (running over the Sierra Madre mountains, swimming the Rio Grande, and riding in the back of a stake truck for two days). Just show up at one of our convenient consulates with $1,160,000, and you can stay indefinitely.

It’s true you can jump the line going into Mexico by marrying a Mexican citizen. I believe the reverse still applies. A Mexican man could marry an American woman to become a citizen, for example, but I can’t recommend it. I married the last sane American woman a while back, and the country is currently populated entirely with assistant district attorneys. I suggest you save your pennies and fly solo.

Month: August 2025

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sippicancottage

A Man Who Has Nothing In Particular To Recommend Him Discusses All Sorts of Subjects at Random as Though He Knew Everything.

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