I got the music in me...

Just about everyone knows what it is like to have a song stuck in your head and how annoying it can be. Especially when it’s a song you never even cared for, but thanks to the way radio stations play songs over and over again these tunes manage to bury themselves in your memory…just lying there, waiting.

Then one day you’re watching television and a commercial comes on featuring the music of ABBA or some other formerly popular but to you always irritating performer. You quickly change the channel, but it’s too late…the song has risen from the swampy bottom of your mind and is planning on staying for a while.

You frantically search your memory for a cool song, something you really like and you play that one over and over in your mind until your think you’ve gotten rid of the other one. Now you think you’re safe and start to go about your business, but wait…no, it can’t be… "See that girl, watch that scene, dig in the dancing queen."

At this point, if you’re anything like me, you start looking for a hard surface to pound your head on, but really the only thing that ever seems to work is to sing it in front of someone else. Before they know what’s happened they’ve got it and you should be home free…it’s kind of like a musical virus.

Some of the most insidious and persistent tunes are television theme songs. I watched shows like Gilligan’s Island and The Beverly Hillbillies when I was a kid and those theme songs are still locked in my memory. Perhaps for an ordinary person like me wasting memory space on this kind of crap doesn’t really matter, but what if there’s a brilliant medical researcher out there that also grew up with watching these same shows?

After years of hard work and ceaseless thinking he or she is on the verge of curing some fatal disease, just needing to call up a few more brain cells to finish the formula…only to find those precious cells already occupied with…"Well, this here’s the story 'bout a man named Jed…"