4/27/06 My Voice Is My Passport. Verify Me.

Pretty soon your thoughts will be your password. (Bonus points if you get the "verify me" reference)

In a sign that I'm getting old, one of the FM pre-sets in my car is for classical music. Every so often I find it a soothing change of pace. This morning as I was scrolling through my stations, the classical station was playing something I distinctly recognized. It's almost as if I knew the piece in its entirety. But I couldn't place where or how I knew it. My mom gets a lot of credit for my early childhood exposure to lots of music, especially classical. But that wasn't quite it. When the piece was over, the dude (are they called DJs on classical stations?) said it was "The Blue Danube Waltz" by Johann Strauss. I made it my mission for the morning to remember that and to look it up.

But before I looked it up, I started to think about Bugs Bunny and how that cartoon alone introduced me to quite a bit of classical music. (Kill the Wabbit, anyone?) And that Looney Tunes may have been the link in my mind to that song. Also of note, I once traveled around the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico and the local music was very Bugs Bunny. So again, a lot of credit to the creators of those cartoons for opening my musical mind at a very young age.

Back to "The Blue Danube Waltz" (if you clicked the link already, you know what's coming). Where do I (and you) know it from? It's the weightless, floating in space song from 2001: A Space Odyssey. For my generation, it has become synonymous with being weightless in space. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that wasn't was Strauss intended. The Simpsons used in when Homer was an astronaut. And, wouldn't you know it... It was in a Looney Tunes cartoon with Daffy Duck. I KNEW IT!

While we're on the topic of music, I have a personal note to Neil Young.... Keep on rockin' in the free world, my friend.