Lab Inspection

The annual lab inspection is today!! There's a palpable sense of excitement in the air, butterflies flutter in otherwise immune (ha) tummies, hearts skip beats. There are whispers of "Is the inspector here yet?" and faces peek into the room of the lab superviser.

*Snort*

Okay, not really. Yes, we are in dire need of excitement in our lives, but really, even WE aren't particularly excited by lab inspectors or inspections. For one thing, we can never find anything after the inspection. Things have been moved around, jammed into draws, hidden out of sight, gloves that you would like to reuse are suddenly whisked into the trash can by a dozen unseen hands.... it's not fun, I can tell you.
And there's the question that always gets different answer every time you ask it: Can we continue to work while the inspection is going on? Rationally, you would think, yes. But then again... what if there's some catastrophic mistake in the method of my working that has escaped my attention all these years and which the eagle-eyed, granite jawed inspector will immediately spot and suspend me from working?

Okay, time to stop speculations. The inspector is here. Hey, she looks kinda young to be an inspector.

I think I can go and work in the lab now.

Enya II and others

Now I feel bad about dissing Enya so much yesterday because since then, I've been listening to her songs and I have to admit: Orinoco Flow and Only If are pretty awesome songs. One can't help but put everything down and sing along- even if one has to make up one's own lyrics for a greater part of the songs.

Why, I hear you ask, can't you just go online and find out the lyrics for these songs, if you like them so much?

What a question to ask. This is why: There's no better way of KILLING a song than to read up its lyrics online.

What is mysterious and full of endless possibilities, potential and speculation falls down with a thud when you see the words hammered in and unchangeable. And really, half the time, one's made-up lyrics are far better.

Case in point: Bon Jovi's "It's My Life". Before, I had loved, LOVED, LOVED that song. Now I know the lyrics and I feel embarrassed singing it. Who the hell is Frankie?

Same thing with all the songs from the Tamil movie "BoYs". Adnan Sami's music, so it's bound to be good, you think. Then you hear the songs, you don't entirely understand the lyrics and everything is great. Then you listen to the songs and understand the lyrics and you cringe from ever singing those songs again. Now you can't even hum the tunes because those godawful lyrics pop into your head and mess up everything.

So after this rant of mine, am I actually saying that Enya's un-understandable, mish-mash lyrics are actually a plus point in her favor?

Yes. I guess that is what I'm saying.

But I still stand by my original point that all her songs sound alike.

Enya

Enya's popularity, in the 90's, and continuing appeal today, among those nostalgic 30-40 year olds, rests on one fact: human beings love repetition. All her songs sound exactly alike, they have the same beat, and the same "garblish" quality in the lyrics: the listener can make out one sentence or two in the song, and these keep repeating themselves with mild variations over and over again, and the rest of it sounds exotic because nobody knows what the heck is being sung. The rest of it even sounds like it could be some exotic foreign language, but not as foreign as say, Arabic, not the kind of foreign that you can pin down and say, Aha, that's French, but foreign, like Celtic, which nobody (that I know of, anyway) knows or has heard, but it's a language that one would LIKE to know or at least pretend that one has heard, because it is just so well, exotic. It evokes carefully crafted scenes of blue seas crashing against Irish coasts with long haired maidens in gowns singing (the "garblish" sections of Enya's songs) like mermaids on the afore-mentioned coasts. But the English sections appease us because we feel a connectedness, because of our understanding of the two sentences, to this Hollywood scene.
Add to that a boom-boom-boom beat and some polyphonies, and there. That's Enya.

Here are the 3 songs that I like of Enya's, and which probably are her most famous:

a) Orinoco Flow


b) Only if


c) May it be from the Lord of the Rings



OKay?

These are the ones that sound kind of new and original.

Now take ANY other song of hers, and every one of them will fit into one of the molds above.

Go on. Try it!