29 July 2005

Rant: Neglect in a Northern Town

My sister and I have "viral song wars" wherein we try to get a catchy tune stuck in each other's head. Today I was telling her that the song stuck in my head intermittently for the past few days has been Dream Academy's Life in Northern Town.

We both agreed that it isn't really catchy but that we liked the song and that the video sticks in our minds after all these years. We talked about how depressing it seemed. The lyrics (about a father who comes to visit his children rarely maybe because the town is economically in the dumps so he has to find work elsewhere - that's the story I made up from the lyrics years ago) and the video (rainy English village) make it one of those songs that, for me, remind me of the sweetness of youth tinged with adult melancoly (we want to go back even if it wasn't the greatest time in our lives).

Or was I just putting more into a crappy video and song that I had forgotten about for two decades?

I came home and did a search for the video and, lo, yahoo has it. I click on the 'view video' only to get an error and message that if I want to view on a Macintosh I have to use Netscape 4.7!! Netscape 4.7 for the Macintosh running OS X, for those of you on PCs, requires that I run Classic (old school operating system emulation). So, I do this, download 4.7 and try to view the video again. Next it tells to download Windows media player. Well, to find the media player that will work on 4.7 is like going on an archeological dig.

At the end of this, my computer gets hung up during installation. The result is that my time machine only goes so far back and I am stuck in the mid-90s.

The song and the video then settle back into the recesses of my mind until three months from now when I am brushing my teeth.

1 comment:

Peridyd said...

Why don't you just use Windows, Greg?
;-)
It would make your life much easier.