Sunday, August 07, 2005

That Dratted Potato Song

Some time before my Nihongo Basic 3 classes ended, the tech boys at the Jap language school had set up a teevee at the reception desk. It was tuned perpetually to NHK, as if some Japanimation fanboy set the channel with the only working remote and proceeded to break it.

I decided to take advantage of the situation and spend my idle time watching and listening to the idiot box to better pick up Japanese. It was, in theory, a good plan with a good fringe benefit: I got to see what Japan had to offer the visual connoisseur in the art of, ah, female appreciation.

It was going well, too. Until--I was watching a kiddie show --the girl host I was appreciating opened her mouth and proceeded to sing about the virtue of potatoes. The song wasn't bad; it was written and arranged well, in fact. But it was insidious. It snared you with its catchy tune and insinuated itself between the folds of your brain the way the grease from a bag of french fries oozes permanently into cheap paper plates.

Today, weeks removed from the original airing, I'm cursed with instant, insistent, and near-permanent recall. Mention "potatoes" and the song plays in my head again and again and again and again and...

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