Drive Tunes and Thoughts

Here's something that I thought (but didn't) tweet this morning:

If SiriusXM has a counter for play count, I hope they used a BIGINT field to store it.

Too nerdy to actually post, but here's the joke: A normal integer field (type INT) stores numbers up to about 2.1 billion. BIGINT basically uses two int fields together to store the number, so you basically get a number that's more than 2 billion times 4 billion. For those of you who are mathematically disinclined (Shelly Williams), that's a lot more than even eight billion!

(You get to double the 2nd one up to 4 billion because -- well shit, no one here cares why. You can always read this if you feel you must. Also, this link is my signal to the real nerds that I don't care to quibble about the little mathematical details that I've omitted.)

The song that brought me to think that a play count of 2 billion might not be enough is this:

It was one of those songs that both Mrs. theskinnyonbenny and I bought independently, thus burning up $1.09 of our children's future inheritance. Then, I almost never play it, because any time I want to hear it, it's already on the radio:

(2023 update: the linked video is no longer online, and I have no idea what it was.)

I'm ready for a full blown cover, in the style of a self-important piano bar singer in a swanky hotel lobby. Can someone do that for me?

There were several times in my youth where a group of us went to Pat O'Brian's piano bar in the French Quarter and loudly demanded that they play the Three's Company theme song. We could shout it for hours, filling their tip jar with our sweaty singles, and getting more and more obnoxious about being ignored. It never occurred to me then that they might not know how to play it.

Would it be true that anyone who is good enough to play in the Pat O's piano bar is good enough to play the Three's Company theme song by ear?

I imagine that today's pianists might not even be able to bring the Three's Company theme song to mind.

Let's go ahead and embed that one too.

(2023 update: I'm tickled pink that this is still online.)

Unrelated, except that it was also a drive-time musing:

I passed a big truck marked "TMI Transportation" the other morning. I like to picture their drivers, standing around the dispatch office trying to kill time while their trailers are readied.

Driver: "You know what? The wife slobbed my knob this morning."

Dispatcher: "Cool. I just made a bowel movement shaped like a pretzel!"