Not Now, You Fool!

I can't afford to be sick just now.

I'm not, yet, but I can feel a cold coming on. Faint scratchiness in the throat, the tiniest hint of a headache, a little vertigo if I stand up too quickly...

I think I'll spend most of today in bed. Tomato soup and toasted cheese for lunch (thanks for the suggestion, allyra!) might help too.

Lists

Look, I love lists, OK? Lists of things I'm interested in - the most important books, the funniest movies, the best songs - always attract my attention. Of course all such lists are to be heavily salted, but I always take them as a challenge. Do I agree or disagree? Do I have or have I read the books / seen the movies / heard the songs? What would I change? (When A&E put out its list of the hundred most important people of the millennium, I had a field day...)

Anyway. Rolling Stone recently put out its list of the 500 best songs. They put no qualifier on that, but of course they really meant popular songs of the last sixty or so years. I haven't started picking it apart yet, but I've had a little fun with it already. Of the 500 songs, there were only 281 which I was familiar with (to the point of being able to call to mind snatches), plus 12 that I'd heard covered by other artists. ("Blue Suede Shoes" was one of the few which appeared twice, for Carl Perkins and for Elvis.) I have 69 of them on my computer, plus 15 covers. (One of the 69 is the Doors' "The End", which I've dropped from my playlists, though it's still on my hard drive. That's a disgusting song.)

One use I intend for the list is as a source of ideas for further exploration. I've decided I definitely want to look into getting albums by Al Green, James Brown, Sly and the Family Stone, The Who, and The Band; Bob Marley, David Bowie, Prince, U2, and Paul Revere and the Raiders are also possibilities. (I found out why I hadn't been able to find a Stones album with "Kicks" on it...)

I doubt, though, that I'll be looking into N.W.A. Pink Floyd is also out. (One of my college roommates was fond of Pink Floyd, and had one or two of their albums ("The Wall" and "Pigs With Wings", I think). Now, when I was a kid I was once seriously ill, with a high enough fever to induce hallucinations. One of the Pink Floyd songs my roommate played always evoked that memory in me.)