Jesus Take the Wheel

Dear James,

As you know, we had a wedding in Gualeguaychú last Saturday. It was quite possibly the most boring wedding I've ever been to, and I'm not afraid to say so in this public forum as we've been absent from duty for the last 3 weeks and are bound to have bored off our last reader(s). And even if one of the wedding guests discovers this post, we can just say that we thought it was a private conversation and didn't realise we'd set the settings to public.

The cheese was flavourless, the leg of parma ham a mound of fat, the main course was chicken with five tiny potatoes and the profiteroles were hard and had dulce de leche inside them. But the crowning turd in the evening's entertainment was that the bride and groom had chosen to hire a cumbia band as the main attraction of the night. Cummerband at a wedding, good. Cumbia band, very bad. (I must credit my mum's boyfriend Andrew for that joke). If you can't remember what cumbia is like. here's a little reminder.



That's the inimitable Pibes Chorros (The Young Scalliwags) with "La Colorada". A brief translation of the Spanish lyrics:

Her make-up smudged and well perfumed
Her friends say she never bathes.
The Red-haired girlalways wears the same trousers
and a Rolling Stones t-shirt,

She's alright from the front and from behind,
but soap and water? No way!
She has sensational hair, and when she walks by,
all the boys sing:

Oh what beautiful hair you have,
Wash it with shampoo!

Nothing much going on there, but as Funseeker so kindly explained to us, the beauty lies in the pun "lavatela con champú", which may be read innocently as "wash your hair with shampoo" or "wash your fanny, whore". It's the gentle charm of the cumbia that makes it the thinking man's street music.

So anyway, the highlight of the wedding came a few hours before the ceremony. Funseeker was getting spruced up so I kicked back with a Quilmes and enjoyed a bit of American Idol. Danny Gokey performed this song. I'd never heard it before, and was just enjoying the "every song tells a story" lyric when he hit me with the chorus punchline. I laughed so much, Funseeker had to curtail her showering activities to help me off the floor. Though I've probably spoiled the punchline for anyone else who hasn't heard the song by printing it in big letters at the top of this post.

Dear Daniel,

If you are asking me to choose, and I know that you are, I'll take the Young Scalliwags every time. Thinking man's street music? More like the Hale and Pace of international pop.

What's the equivalent of "biting my tongue" for when I'm writing to somebody? (I'm also yet to work out what to say instead of "as we speak" - leave the lol rofl acronyms, somebody needs to get working on that...) Whatever it is (Breaking my fingers? Corterising my hands?), I'm doing it about Jesus Take the Wheel. Just one thing: "Sleeping like a rock."

Like a rock?

A rock?