Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Going the Distance

News in from my brother in Omaha on the perfect intersection of life and pop music:

So the annual Boy Scout "Pinewood Derby" was held at Garrett's school today. This is where the boy scouts construct a car out of a block of wood and race them down a rather sophisticated track that times each car to the zillionth of a second or something. Short of the long is that Garrett's car took third place overall (after three years of rather tough luck). We attribute this to two things. First, the car's design was much improved over previous years (more specifically, I had no input on the design process). Secondly, we listened to this Cake song on our way to the race. It is now forever cemented as our Pinewood Derby theme song.

Take a listen and see if you can't picture it:

He's going the dis...


I know I can and it gets me ALL pumped up. Way to go Garrett!

4 comments:

Night Editor said...

Perfect song! And this on a day when I discussed a new book series aimed at "Boys who love cars but hate English classes," and an anthology about "our first cars." I could have had this Cake song playing in the background. The synchronicity of things.

Anonymous said...

Cake inspires many...where I work, we consider one of their numbers to be our department song. It's called "Nugget", and aside from the catchy tune, the magic words are in the refrain - "shut the @%#! up/learn to buck up". Pure gold.

Anonymous said...

Nugget is probably the coolest Cake tune ever. Aside from the refrain, it has spectacularly nonsensical lyrics. I am truly amazed how they consistently come up with goofy-ass phrases that actually work in their songs.

The Distance probably has the second best example of this: "Bowel-shaking earthquakes of doubt and remorse/ Assail him, impale him with monster truck force". I have no words for how cool this is....I'm getting a little misty.

JC in NE

Sassmaster said...

Aww. The Cake affects everyone so strongly. I like the line "Satan is my motor." I can relate, especially this week.