Youtube Playlists of My Music-themed Articles

This article is a compilation of YouTube playlists for articles that I have written and cited music YouTube links. Some of my articles had numerous YouTube links that I divided them up into two or three playlists. I will periodically revisit the playlists to ensure that the links work, finding replacements as appropriate. I will update this article and the table as I write more music-focused articles and include YouTube music links.

Visit my YouTube channel, and click Playlists, then click Grid or List. You can autoplay all the videos in order or individually.

• Grid option: To immediately play the collection, hover over thumbnail, then click Play All. To view the list of selectable videos, click the playlist title.
• List option: To immediately play the collection, hover over thumbnail, then click Play All. To view the list of selectable videos, click View full playlist.

Theme	YouTube playlist link	Blog article link
Superbowl 2017 ads with familiar music	playlist	Familiar Music in Superbowl 2017 Product Ads (2/2017)
Memory lane trip of ads and music	playlist	Familiar Music in Product Ads … (1/2017)
Some lyrical memorizations and related	playlist	Some Lyrical Blasts from the Past (1/2016)
More Halloween music	playlist	Halloween Music Baker's Dozen Matter (11/2012)
Halloween music	playlist	Baker's Dozen Halloween YouTube Links (10/2012)
Dreamy music	playlist 1 of 2, 2 of 2	Dreamy Music (8/2012)
Summer songs	playlist	Individual links not available. Only created the playlist as exercise for Creating a YouTube Playlist (4/2012)
Family	playlist 1 of 2, 2 of 2	Family Matters (12/2011)
Food music (1st in series)	playlist	MnM--Munch n Music (5/2011)
Sweets & misc. (2nd in series)	playlist 1 of 3, 2 of 3, 3 of 3	MnM--Munch n Music, Sweetyummies (6/2011)
Alcohol & tobacco consumables (3rd in series)	playlist	MnM--Munch n Music, Sin Ingestibles (7/2011)
TDay travel modes (1st in series)	playlist 1 of 2, 2 of 2	Turkey Week Travel--Planes, Trains N Cars (11/2010)
Water travel (2nd in series)	playlist 1 of 2, 2 of 2	Post-TDay Travel--Water Water Everywhere (11/2010)
Air and ground travel (3rd in series)	playlist 1 of 2, 2 of 2	Post-TDay Travel--Part 3 of 3 (12/2010)
Parody	playlist	Moe-SKI-Toe--I've Got Me Under Your Skin (9/2010)
Button occupations	playlist	Rich Man Poor Man (4/2010)
Phones and letters	playlist	Technical Communications Means (3/2010)
Weird Al	playlist	Dual-theme "Weird Al" Yankovic Songs (10/2009)

Store Coupon Madness

I clip coupons, mostly grocery store coupons. I also clip eatery coupons, just a lot fewer of them. I've not registered with restaurants.com or groupon. I don't often think to search for coupons online. I myself find that most of the coupons that I see and put any energy into arrive in my Sunday paper. And I dump probably 99%. Call me a bit behind for how I hunt (or not) for savings.

Many years ago, I remember a grocery store at one time hut put up a round-table display with maybe a noble idea that customers would bring in coupons they snipped, and obtain coupons that other people would leave for sharing. I don't remember more than a few weeks had passed that I no longer saw the table. I speculate that maybe the table overflowed from excesses and took too much floor space.

About the early nineties, some local supermarkets started doubling and tripling coupons, up to some maximum value. The campaigns were pretty nice while they lasted. I think they stopped after a year or so. I'm guessing that stores really got squeezed on the margins because of some more diligent customers like me. I do remember that collecting and sorting for the multiple savings was time-consuming, but the payoff pretty good.

I'm less mad now over store coupons than in the past when it seems I embarked on reviewing, clipping, sorting, redeeming, and eventually tossing out numerous saved ones. Alas, so many would expire. Or the store didn't handle the product. Or I waffled over whether I really wanted to hunt down the products. I'm now better at reviewing for items I think I might buy and use coupons for. I've arrived at coupon characteristics that get my attention, for good and bad. The following lists are my coupon raves and peeves.

Coupon characteristics that make me cheer

• General
  • Plenty of coupons for merchandise that I buy
  • Numeric value that amounts to 25 to 50% off or better
  • Buy one, get one free (maybe even buy two, get one free)
  • Applicable savings for single-serving rather than bulk such as packaged candy (evil food)
• Visuals
  • Clearly legible expiration date, preferably one month or more, for a Sunday or end of a month
  • Thorough information, such as store area type, applicable varieties, packaging (weights, counts)—"any size or variety" favored
  • Graphics, such as color pictures for iconic visual processing (My local supermarket has in-house, yellow, portrait-oriented coupons that would be even more attractive with at least line images.)

Coupon characteristics that drive me mad:

• General
  • Dinky value, like 25 or 40¢. Inflation has crept up so much over the years, even $1 savings is no longer necessarily compelling. Don't those nationally known companies marketing people pay attention to how out-of-date those humongous savings look?
  • Discount offers that look good, but the list price is so high that the savings are no savings (predominant condition in drug stores, it seems)
  • No such item in store
  • No such item for that manufacturer
  • No such packaging size for that manufacturer
• Bundling
  • Requirement to buy more than one, such as so-much-off if you buy two
  • Requirement to buy more than one type of product. This condition makes the hunt like a treasure hunt. My supermarket frequently has deals for buying one or two items, and throwing in one to 6 items, many house-brand. Sometimes I bite, often not.
• Expirations
  • Short expiration time window
  • Expiration date placed anywhere except at the top (I hate hunting for dates, especially when they are at the bottom of the coupon.)
  • Expirations that are NOT on Sundays or ends of the months (I'm a Sunday shopper most times, and it bugs me when I miss a coupon by one day because of my own oops.)
  • Time windows with a start date that occurs after the current calendar date
• Visuals
  • Gradient or or other poor contrast between background and foreground
  • Tiny font (sixes, fives, nines, and eights when they all look similar)
  • Illegibility or graphics resolution for varieties of the product (occasionally, misalignment of color layers, particularly in accompanying ad)
  • Lack of information for store area location, particularly for meals that could be room temperature, refrigerated, or frozen Yes, I do microwavable meals! (If I need to hunt, I'm not likely to.)
  • Pet food coupons that accompany ads with pictures resembling people food
  • Oversized coupon, requiring folding
  • Undersized coupon, easily misplaced or misfiled
  • Questionable literalness for items, such as exact flavor, item size that falls outside the coupon listed range

Although my focus is on grocery store coupons, I have a few thoughts about eatery discounts. Likes: Good savings value, expiration, discounts places I go to or would go to. Dislikes, applicable to the ad than the offered discount itself: No address, phone number, maps, web address.

MnM--Munch n Music

YouTube playlist for this article,
playlist compilation article

Was in the mood for writing about two of my favorite topics, both rolled into one. My thoughts started out with wanting to pop some popcorn with my quite-old air popper. During the course of popping, melting butter, and mixing the butter and salt into the popped kernels into a large kettle, I thought about having read kernel popping action. I read that the kernel turns inside out. So I decided to look up some youtube videos. Eureka!

• Brainiac Science Abuse - Popcorn Popping In Slow Motion (This video shows someone popping popcorn on a stove top.)
• High speed video of popcorn kernel popping at 5,400 fps
• Pop corn in slow motion

I thought about a song titled "Popcorn" and found a video, which is actually the moog music set to video. Gershon Kingsley wrote in about 30 seconds, according to background info on him. A song that sounds very similar to Popcorn is Percolator.

• Peanuts (theme)
• Peanuts (do-wop)
• Peanut Vendor (Beatles)
• Take Me Out to the Ball Game
• Palisades Park
• Java (Al Hirt)
• You're the Cream in My Coffee

I found more substantial consumables as follows. Of course, themes about music and food must include Weird Al. I did sandwich some of his videos with other food-term songs. Some of these videos are trips down memory lane. Click and get down!

• Eat It
• Chicken Dance Song
• Funky Chicken
• Turkey Trot
• On Top of Spaghetti
• Annoying Orange: Lady Pasta Song
• Rye or the Kaiser
• Bread and Butter
• Turn the Tub Around (I Can't Believe It's Butter/Turn the Beat Around)
• My Bologna
• Famous Alka-Seltzer "No Matter What Shape" TV Commercial - from 1966!

Rearview Mirroring TX Towns

Texas has 254 counties and about 1030 school districts. In googling for the exact number of districts, I ran across different totals. Every 10 years, school district boundaries require verification. Texas Education Agency (TEA) is in charge of delineating the borders. The project is harder than it might sound. School districts expand, contract, consolidate, disagree with other districts over where the borders are, use natural borders that change because of nature, etc.

Back in the early 90s, TEA hired me as a contract "mapping technician", a title much more impressive sounding than the reality. I, along with other co-workers, needed to verify Texas school districts' borders according to legal definitions. (School district superintendents mailed back a TEA-sent letter.) Also, we needed to read descriptions that might be subject to different interpretations. One task was taping narrow red tape (!) on paper maps to delineate the boundaries.

During my time at TEA, I logged the names of many cities and towns—160, to be exact—because they caught my eye. I recently ran across my hardcopy file while reorganizing my workspace. Because I couldn't find Broom City in my computer, I knew I'd need to re-key the list before I could write a decent article about the places. As I re-keyed, I could see certain commonalities gel—lots of food, bodies of water, communities, money, gaps and related, wordplay (homophonic), a few names that could either try peoples' spelling or induce residents to learn spelling quickly, comforting words, a few peoples' or celebrities' names, shooter's paradise, ...

I've listed my best theme categories and cities/towns, a subset of the group I logged originally. I omitted county names so they won't dilute the collective impact of the names. A file with the names of all 160 municipalities and their counties is available in a table-formatted file. An asterisk below (*) denotes a municipality that I put into more than one category (asterisked in its first category appearance).

Food (one of my favorite subjects)
Oatmeal, Pancake, Sunny Side Community*, Coffee City, Teacup Community*, Honey Island*, Pecan Gap, Atwater Prairie Chicken (national wildlife refuge), Turkey, Birds Nest [soup], Krum* (okay, not the most appetizing, not normal spelling), Plum, Punkin Center (ok, another not normal spelling), Crabb (phonetic anyway), Hungerford (not food, but related), Bootleg Community*

Water bodies and related
Runaway Bay, Lake Run-A-Muck*, Hide-A-Way Lake*, Lake O' The Pines*, Possom Kingdom Lake, Bland Lake, Lake JB Thomas, Newgulf (24 miles from Old Ocean), Old Ocean (24 miles from Newgulf), Canyon Lake, Canyon Lake Acres, Canyon Lake Forest, Canyon Lake Mobile Home Estates, Canyon Lake Shores, Canyon Lake Village, Canyon Lake Village West, Honey Island (42 miles inland), Rock Island (80 miles inland)

Communities
Bootleg Community, Teacup Community, Sunny Side Community, Tobacco Patch Community, Type Community, Profitt Community*, Ding Dong Community (in Bell County), Eulogy Community*, Welfare Community, Old Bowling Community

Structures
Structure, Sweet Home*, Fosters Store*, Guys Store*, Carls Corner*, Pearsons* Chapel

Words of comfort
Comfort, Point Comfort, Sweet Home, Blanket, Cool, Sublime, Happy, Smiley*, Sunny Side Community, Eulogy Community

Money
Cost, Dinero, Cheapside, Nickel, Dime Box, Jerry's Quarters*, Lohn*

Gaps and related
Cranfills Gap, Indian Gap, Buffalo Gap, Notrees, Nada

Names and celebrities
Bumstead, Kermit, Bigfoot*, Bebe, Panna Maria (Virgin Mary, not bread), Big Sandy, Jerry's Quarters

Shooter's paradise
Gun Barrel City, Cut and Shoot, Bangs*, Point Blank, Trophy Club

Body parts or features
Cheek, Wink, Smiley, Shiner, Bald Hill, Bangs, Whispering Wings, Bigfoot

Hyphenations and apostrophications
Jot-Em-Down, Lake Run-A-Muck, Hide-A-Way Lake, Lake O' The Pines, Hell's Half Acre, Jerry's Quarters

Apostrophe deficiency
Fosters Store, Guys Store, Carls Corner, Pearsons Chapel

Wordplay (mostly homophonic)
Lohn, Hoop and Holler, Priddy, Inadale, Arp, Tye, Blewett, Pyote, Rhome, Profitt Community, Krum, Dew

Other special names
Loves Lookout, Barwise, Pelican Spit Military Airport (Reservation), Tool

Rear-viewing Year of Blogging

I started blogging just about a year ago, having decided my output would be three times a month, which breaks down to one about every ten-day period. For some people, that's way too seldom. Well, that's the pace I can live with. I want to put out quality, well-thought-out writing that frequently includes links, which are often time-consuming to vet.

Journey start
I joined my writing clublet, TheWriteJob, a little over a year ago to meet other writers and would-be writers. The community blog sparked my interest in contributing to it, and to eventually launch my own blog. After having published six articles there, I registered for my own blog. I ported my previous articles over (truncated and linked the earlier articles); and have been publishing here since.

Theme
In setting up my blogspot, I thought about my theme. I came up with "writing mostly for language enlightenment, entertainment, and a-muse-meant". It became more of a guide for me to determine my article topics. Low standards—if I fulfill any of those broad categories for an article, I succeed in achieving my topic goal.

Theme expansion into categories
A few months ago, I added a line to the theme, as I felt categories were starting to pop up. My category labels—language, tech communications, EZ recipes, food, wordplay, humor, music, tech topics, and how-to's—also form the basis of my article today, compiling and analyzing stats of my year in blogging. I'm omitting discussion of Google Analytics. I use them, but don't have enough of a fan base or readership to report anything impressive. :-)

First compilation file
*LinkedIn membership required to view this file*
Awhile back I had created an compilation file that included the article title, linked url, publish timeframe (early, mid, late part of specified month), and summary. The format was 2-column landscape. Recently, I decided to redo the compilation file. Numerous times of adding and removing column breaks with every update to make the file look nice started to irk me.

Second compilation file
(Newer! Improved! Now with category descriptors!)
*LinkedIn membership required to view this file*
The impetus to change the formatting was wanting to categorize the articles, logically the descriptors I thought of. Also, I knew I'd want to write and time an article pertaining to the 1-year milestone. I removed the column formatting and breaks, then converted it into an 11-column table. The first column has the title, URL, and summary, the second column has the date I published, and the rest of the columns have the category descriptors and check marks. Because food is near and dear to my heart, I highlighted food rows in yellow to make them stand out.

For each article, my new compilation file has check marks in the categories I consider appropriate. For further enhancement, I highlighted the rows that had food themes. I did pause over designating some category names for a few articles. For instance, can a food article be a tech article? Yes, I decided "Wanted Unholed Lotta Bagel" fit the descriptor of tech topics because of history, techniques, and related background.

I waffled (food!) over articles about language and technical communications. Most that fit in one category also fit the other category. In looking at my table (place for food!), language was more predominant than my profession of tech comm (writing, editing).

Stats (drum roll! yum!)
Since September 6, 2009, I have published 36 articles. I don't include the current article in my stats, although I will have updated my table to include it (code green). Deciding categories was the longest part of the process. The fun part was tallying everything—the number of check marks for each descriptor, the number of checkmarks for each article—first for each of the five pages of my printout (yes, hardcopy!), then adding them up. Natch, if I had a LOT to tally, I would have put everything into Excel. I used Word. (Gasp!)

Category	Qty check marks
Language	20
Tech communications	14
EZ recipes	8
Food	11
Wordplay	15
Humor	21
Music	10
Tech topics	16
How to's	18

Articles with the most descriptors—a 3-way tie with 6 descriptors each
Fish Fries Telephone
Wanted Unholed Lotta Bagel
Technical Communications Means

Articles with the 2nd most descriptors—a 5-way tie with 5 descriptors each
Vocabs of Steel
Greater Less Fewer More Thans--More or Less
Bad-Prose Rants from Lady Wawa
Pronunciations Heck with Hermione and Homage
Color N R Lives

Rest of article quantities (titles omitted)
Note to novice statisticians: I tic-marked the article quantities and added them up to confirm they total 36—no duplicated counts and no undercounts.

Qty articles	Qty descriptors
2	4
10	3
4	2
2	1

Categories for this article
For this article, I would categorize it into technical communication, food (coupla nibbles!), humor (minor rib ticklers!), tech topics, and how to's. I don't consider light mentioning of the other categories to quite warrant checking off all the descriptors. :-) Although I did not include numbered steps that indicate a process, I think there's enough of a road map feel here for people who want to put information on a grid.

Thanksgiving Day Menu, From a Language Perspective

Being someone who thinks about the English language a lot, I often think of associative terminology. In my topic about Thanksgiving Day food, I'm putting a twist on it and injecting some flavor into the discussion, language-wise. Turkey is at the top of the food list. For vegetarians and vegans, skip reading "turkey", or discontinue reading this article. Other items are (from the top of my head) potatoes, sweet potatoes (sometimes interchangeably called yams), cranberry sauce, dressing (aka stuffing), gravy, and pumpkin pie. What about veggies? They'll roll onto the scene. I'll bypass food discussion pertaining to all-day football, as that could be an entire subject by itself.

Turkey: Legend has it that Benjamin Franklin wanted the turkey to be the national symbol rather than the eagle. Google results indicate Franklin was displeased with the choice of the eagle, but not entirely clear that he lobbied for the turkey. More recently, in the previous century anyway, turkey has become an unflattering term. "Jive turkey!" was a derisive insult often uttered by George Jefferson of The Jeffersons TV show. Turkey has been a term used to label a bad movie; even better, Golden Turkey Awards go to both movies and directors. Cold turkey as a term does not refer to the temperature of the bird. One other Turkey is the country, which always makes me go "hmmm" when I think of it in conjunction with another country that makes me think of food—Greece.

Potatoes: We have Mr. Potato Head, couch potato, hot potato, .... Regarding edible potatoes, there seem to be lots of ways to prepare them, serve them, and buy them already prepared—baked, mashed, twice-cooked, scalloped, fried, liquified or nearly liquified into soups, chunked into salads, etc.

Sweet Potatoes and Yams: This subtopic required googling for "sweet potatoes vs yams". And wow, what a load of results! Here's one link that has descriptions for each—http://www.loc.gov/rr/scitech/mysteries/sweetpotato.html. Sounds like yams are not as common as sweet potatoes in my neck of the woods. Oh, well, as Popeye might say, "I yam what I yam and I yam what I yam that I yam!" Maybe Popeye doesn't handle hot potatoes, sweet or not. Anyway, let's move to a sweeter topic—Swee'Pea, his adopted baby. That brings us to ...

Sweet Pea(s): Peas—those Crayola-green spheroids. Oh, if they're canned peas, they have that odd olive-green color about them. Sweet Pea does seem an odd name for a baby. Nevertheless, Tommy Roe made a hit song in the mid-60s named "Sweet Pea" about a girl. (Well, this looked like a good area as any to shoehorn "sweet peas" as a candidate vegetable for the Thanksgiving Day meal.)

Cranberry Sauce: The first time I saw cranberry sauce, it came out of can. It resembled jelly that you dish out with a knife or spoon. It retained the shape of the can and the utensil characteristic used to serve it up. It didn't pour like a sauce. Even odder, I didn't consider it tasty for such a pretty color. Still don't. Even its liquid relative—cranberry cocktail—isn't that appealing to me.

Dressing and Stuffing: I think these terms are strange names for the same food—flavored and moistened diced bread that contains other items—celery, onions, sage (predominant flavor!), .... Stuffing, as a term, makes sense, particularly when it's actually placed inside the turkey. Dressing, as a term, makes no sense to me. Related, the term "salad dressing" makes sense, as you're dressing a salad. Turkey dressing? I don't see turkey dressing dressing a turkey like I see salad dressing dressing a salad.

Gravy: Good gravy, gravy train, Gravy Train. Good gravy—this expression has nothing to do with good or gravy. It's a polite and not-that-common expression of surprise. The two kinds of gravy trains pertain to implicitness of advantage, the proper-noun expression (dog food) having been named from the lower-case gravy train. Eh, let's leave the Gravy Train at the station and move on to pumpkin pie. (I rethought my initial intent to hyperlink to Gravy Train. Readers are on their own for this googling.)

Pumpkin Pie: These two words can evoke lots of language imagery separately. Pumps have kin? What kin they look like? Lotion pumps? Miniature oil-drilling pumps? OK. There are some etymological roots for pumpkin, but they all sound like slacked pronunciation devolution to me, since the word pump has no kinship with the word pumpkin. As for pie, besides the edible ones, I also think of pi and pie charts.

What's after dessert? How about antacids? Anyway, I hope this article has provided some food for thought. May your Thanksgiving Day be a good one, with plenty to be thankful for.