As You Walk Along With Your Ding-Ding-Dong

Just watch this this 1975 video of the song “Ding a Dong,” the winning entry of the 1975 Eurovision Song Contest, as performed by the inexplicably named disco band Teach-In.

Okay, so a few things.

Why does the audience look so miserable? Okay, sure, the song sucks, but why would they go to this show in the first place?

Wait, was this actually East Germany?

Was attendance to the disco party compulsory?

Were they shopped in after the fact using so-called “green screen” technology?

Is there a song where the word dong gets mentioned more often?

I think Dina put it best when she attempted to comprehend how this thing came about: “Someone had to have written this down at some point. And then showed it to someone else. And then they recorded it.”

Another point for Dina: “Is she saying ‘Maybe it’s a bigot’?”

Is the whole point of the song to be constantly singing so you never feel sad? That seems like a poor plan, seeing as how no one will want to be your friend if you’re dinging dongs all day. I mean, she’s there singing this song on a microphone and no one in the audience looks remotely happy. WHERE DID SINGING GET YOU, LADY FROM TEACH-IN?

At 2:03, she attempts to make contact with one of the robots in the audience and my heart just aches for her, this lonely ding-dong woman from West Germany.

This is all. Go forth and ding all the dongs.

OMG, you have to hear this, but not because it’s good, previously:

• “Happy Song,” by Boney M, as well as other disco-based school invasions
• “I’m on Fire,” by Maggie Mae
• “You Bring Out the Savage in Me,” by Frances Day
• “Banana,” by Jane Chiquita
• “At the Same Time, You Are Crazy Mind, Crazy Mind,” by Daydream
• “The Swim,” by Little Nell
• “Les sucettes (The Lollipops),” by France Gall
• “Neon City 1978,” by Mistral

“The Girl Likes Lozenges. Can You Blame Her?”

The lessons to be learned here: (1) One good ye-ye deserves another, and (2) Serge Gainsbourg had a pervy sense of humor.

Yesterday, I wrote about the French Adele, but in bouncing around online to research that post, I came across a story about another French pop song from the same era — “Les Sucettes,” an ode to lollipops sung in 1966 by France Gall. Yes, that’s her stage name, and yes, it’s just one letter off from France Gaul, which would be the name of the country she’s from and the ancient name for area that country now occupies. Such nationalism! She damn near rivals that airport guy.

And what a face, too. Seeing what she looks like, you shouldn’t be surprised to learn that France Gall was once considered for a live-action musical adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. It failed to materialize after Walt Disney died in 1966, but no worries, because Gall’s career was also stewarded along by Serge Gainsbourg. The same year as Disney’s death, Gainsbourg wrote the song “Les Sucettes” specifically for Gall. The following video resulted.

Let’s take a quick inventory: It’s about sucettes (“lollipops,” but literally “suck-ettes”), the French lollipops of the 60s were flagrantly phallic, cutaways show women who aren’t France Gall cramming lollipops into their mouths and, finally, people wear full-body lollipop costumes that allow them to waggle their long, pointed shafts back and forth. Gainsbourg had transformed Gall into a Lolita. Incredibly, though Gall was nineteen when “Les Sucettes” was released, she claims she was oblivious to all the sexual implications. And though you have to wonder what nunnery could have produced a girl naïve enough that she found nothing suspicious about the lyrics “When the candy stick / With anise flavor / Goes down Annie’s throat,” According to Wikipedia, Gall was so mortified when someone finally pointed out the obvious that she dissolved her successful partnership with Gainsbourg.

And that, friends, is the story of the sweet little French girl who accidentally sang a song about gobbling dongs.

Dwigt, Meet Tyson Homosexual

From Co-Worker Chris, a lesson in the dangers of auto-replace and a reminder that computers can only be a smart as the people using them. I can’t try to say it any better than Steve Benen, so here’s how he put it:

Auto-correct can be a very helpful feature of any word-processing program. But when conservatives use it, they run the risk of embarrassing themselves. Some far-right sites that subscribe to the Associated Press feed, for example, will use auto-correct to change “Democratic Party” to “Democrat Party.” This, of course, is because they have the temperament of children.

But the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow website takes the phenomenon one step further with its AP articles. The far-right fundamentalist group replaces the word “gay” in the articles with the word “homosexual.” I’m not entirely sure why, but it seems to make the AFA happy. The group is, after all, pretty far out there.

The problem, of course, is that “gay” does not always mean what the AFA wants it to mean. My friend Kyle reported this morning that sprinter Tyson Gay won the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials over the weekend. The AFA ran the story, but only after the auto-correct had “fixed” the article.

That means — you guessed it — the track star was renamed “Tyson Homosexual.” The headline on the piece read, “Homosexual eases into 100 final at Olympic trials.” Readers learned:

Tyson Homosexual easily won his semifinal for the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials and seemed to save something for the final later Sunday.

His wind-aided 9.85 seconds was a fairly cut-and-dry performance compared to what happened a day earlier. On Saturday, Homosexual misjudged the finish in his opening heat and had to scramble to finish fourth, then in his quarterfinal a couple of hours later, ran 9.77 to break the American record that had stood since 1999. […]

Homosexual didn’t get off to a particularly strong start in the first semifinal, but by the halfway mark he had established a comfortable lead. He slowed somewhat over the final 10 meters-nothing like the way-too-soon complete shutdown that almost cost him Saturday. Asked how he felt, Homosexual said: “A little fatigued.”

Now, the AFA has since changed the article back to the way it was originally written by the AP reporter, but don’t worry, Kyle got the screen-grab before the AFA edited the piece back.

There’s just something helpful about starting a Monday morning on a hilarious note.

Can’t help but wonder what else could be corrupted by this replace code. “Now we don our homosexual apparel”? Oprah Winfrey’s best friend Homosexualle King? Famed sherpa Tenzig Norhomosexual? And how might the AP story about this incident be filtered, if such an article were to be written? “… which erroneously and nonsensically changed the last name of would-be Olympian Tyson Homosexual to ‘Homosexual’ and referring to him solely as ‘Homosexual’ upon second reference throughout the remainder of the article. ‘I had to laugh about being called Tyson Homosexual,’ because that’s not my name,” said Homosexual, who also clarified that he is heterosexual.”

And since they’re already crazy, why not just replace “Hillary Clinton” with “Borg Queen”?

And how to the people who receive this news feel about it literally going through a filter that changes the meaning of words?