Some time later, Mr. Victorino got off the elevator.  At first it seemed like he might have simply pushed the wrong button; other than Mr. Abrahamson, the only partner who ever came to the clerk cage was Mr. Brandon, who used to have an office on the 12th floor and had trouble remembering that he was now on 10.

But Mr. Victorino, it seemed, was in the right place after all.  Rather than staring around in bewilderment for a few seconds before turning right around and hitting the elevator button, he began examining the cubicles, hunting for whatever clerks might happen to be around.  There was only one for him to find.

“Peter!” he exclaimed, trying to look as much like Santa Claus holding a sackful of toys as a lawyer can.  “How would you like to sit in on a drafting meeting?”

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

Actually, Peter understood him perfectly well.  Having failed in every attempt to rid his mind of the offensive noise, he had spent the previous hour or so watching subtitled videos on YouTube in the hope of teaching himself how to read lips.  He was pleased—and, frankly, a little startled—at his success, but his excitement was significantly dampened by the fact that, unless he could find some way to get the tune out of his head, this could be the only way he would ever be able to understand anyone again.

Speaking of dampened spirits, a drafting meeting is not the kind of treat you would like to wake up to on Christmas morning.  It’s not even something you’d like to have at the end of a long Thanksgiving, simply as a break from watching football and eating turkey and playing football and eating more turkey and watching more football.  Every job has many aspects that may seem boring to people who don’t understand them, and every job usually has at least one thing that’s a little boring even when you know what’s going on.  Drafting meetings had been known to put to sleep people who were dosed up on speed.

Then again, Peter had already tried the interesting stuff, the things that are supposed to distract you, the things that are designed to make you forget what you’re doing, what you’re thinking about, and which decade it is.  None of it had helped to get the song out of his head.  He didn’t really think it would work, but without any better ideas, he decided to give extreme tedium a shot.

“Sure,” he said, lying through his teeth.  “Sounds like fun.”

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

The elevator ride was awkward, but only a bit.  Peter’s newfound lip-reading talent was next to useless when he wasn’t looking at the person head-on, so Victorino’s explanation of the brief they were going to be drafting was lost on him.  But Mr. Victorino, like most of the partners, was perfectly capable of carrying on a conversation all by himself, so at least it was only awkward for one of them.

For Peter it was just painful.  He didn’t care much for the elevator music.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

They got off on 19, and Peter, who was starting to feel disoriented and could barely keep putting one foot in front of the other, followed Mr. Victorino to a large conference room.  All the bigwigs were there: Abrahamson and his all-penetrating gaze, Wachowsky and his prodigious mustache, Brandon and his deer-in-the-headlights look.  Fortunately they were all focused on a screen, half of which was displaying a document and the other half the just slightly too-close-for-comfort image of the face of one of their associates from another branch.  They hardly even noticed Peter and Victorino’s entrance, which Peter appreciated, especially when he tried to sit down in his chair and missed.

BUM BA DA DA DEE BA BUUUM

There was no mistaking the fact that the tune was now louder than ever.  Peter felt like his whole body was vibrating, as though he were sitting a few inches away from a speaker at a heavy metal concert.  He kept reaching up to touch his ears, certain that they were going to start bleeding at any second.  Even if the brief they were discussing had been the most fascinating document in the history of the legal profession, Peter would not have been able to pay attention; you might as well have asked him to listen to their conversation from the far side of the moon.

BUM BA DA DA DEE BA BUUUM

Eventually a sensation got through to him.  One of the lawyers was tapping him on the shoulder.  He looked up.  Victorino appeared to be asking his opinion on something.  He had no idea what.  He was too far gone to try to read lips.  He didn’t even think he could read period.

Peter tried to come up with some plausible response, but he just couldn’t overcome the noise.

BUM BA DA DA DEE BA BUUUM

I know I, even as I get old
Have an urge that cannot be controlled
When the wrapper I tear
From my chocolate, I swear
I still look for that bright flash of gold

Event: Birth of Roald Dahl, author of James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
Year: 1916
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roald_Dahl

A. 位理英牟　B. 閉奴利怡　C. 自与於士　D. 愛梨社倍寸

E. 榎騰和足等

Hoo boy.  Theoman uses analysis of interlinguistic phonetic complexity to come up with his answers.  I think that’s a bit over all of our heads.  I’ll just give him a grade: 2/5.  Not bad.  Maybe if we understood all this technical business, we’d be better at stuff, too.

A Fan talked about movies instead, which I think I should have an easier time understanding.  That is, until he starts talking about movies I’ve never seen.  Maybe he should have stuck to more familiar titles, because then he might have gotten some answers right.  He did surpass Theoman in one area, correctly picking Elizabeth over Mary as the most common name for English queens (apparently I failed to predict any controversy over this Mary business).  In conclusion, I think Bad Dumbledore probably would have made a pretty good William the Conqueror because his primary skill is yelling, but I doubt he could have matched Laurie’s George IV.

Shirley finally provided an accurate count of all these various rulers, though nobody seemed to have any trouble with any of the boys.  Soldiers do tend to hog all the attention, but I don’t see what her problem is with the color orange.  Anyway, she clearly knows her monarchs.  She quickly spotted William, the first (Norman) King of England in the first spot, A.  Not content to rest on her laurels there, she also correctly identified C as George and E as Edward (a classic A Fan pick, though not this week. And I suppose it could have been Elizabeth as well).  If anyone out there wants to know more about English kings and queens, I suggest you talk to Shirley.  The real ones, that is.  A Fan is still the expert on their semi-fictional portrayals.

Elizabeth proved to be the most elusive of the rulers this time around, in part because Theoman wasn’t even looking for her.  Both A (William) and B (Henry) were identified by one contestant as looking “the most feminine.”  The second character in B does contain a component meaning “woman,” so I guess there’s some basis to that (Sorry, Hal).  Queen Bess herself is hiding out at D, emphasizing her stalwart defense (final character) of noble Albion and perhaps exaggerating her prowess as a lover (first character).

Also, I’d like to apologize to Colin Firth on Dragon’s behalf because she said he looked like D.  He didn’t deserve that.

So you like heads of state, eh?  I’ll give you heads of state.  Let’s try it again on the west side of the ol’ pond.  We’re not as big on repetition here in the colonies, so I’m giving you the names of the first five presidents.

A. 丸芝努止怒　B. 方農呂應　C. 万遅所濃　D. 仕曳八阿則沼

E. 安陀武受

He hadn’t expected sitting down in his cube to cure him, or to make him feel any more comfortable; in fact, the tune was at its loudest yet.  But in his cube there was a computer, and the computer could be used to do research.  He had expected to use it for that purpose every day, but this was his first significant online investigation at work since Wachowsky had told him to look up some information about “tortes.”  Because he had plenty of spare time, and because he thought there was at least a small chance that Wachowsky had actually meant to include the final e, Peter did the project twice, once about breaches of civil duty and once about cakes.  However, worried that the latter could be interpreted as a crack about the partner’s weight, he only turned in the former.  For whatever reason, Wachowsky had never since asked him to do research.

It was rough going.  He Wikipedia-ed “Song stuck in your head,” but it wasn’t very helpful.  He learned that the phenomenon can be called earworm, music meme, humsickness, repetunitis, or tune wedgy, and that it is more likely to seriously bother women than men, but he found these facts somewhat less than helpful.  The entire article contained only one sentence on cures: “The best way to eliminate an unwanted earworm is to simply play a different song.”

Peter had tried that.  He continued to try it, blasting random songs he found on the internet at volumes that must have pissed off his fellow clerks.  Presumably they only let him get away with it because they felt that an Abrahamson thrashing was more than enough for one person to be put through in a day.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

It didn’t work.

Web MD was also a bust.  He actually found an article on the topic, which was more than he had expected, since as far as he knew getting a song stuck in your head wasn’t considered a disease.  Unfortunately, the conclusion was the same as everywhere else: no known way to improve the situation, and definitely no cure.  The article did include a list of the Top Ten Most Stick-able Songs according to a 2003 study.  On any other day, reading this list would have been a nightmare and destroyed his already limited productivity.  Peter tried to use them as ammunition; surely one of these awfully invasive jingles, TV themes, and one-hit wonder hits would be strong enough to defeat the one that was currently occupying his mind.  But even the worst that the Baha Men, the Village People, and Disneyworld could offer wasn’t enough to dislodge it.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

After that his “research” became increasingly less directed.  He looked up several hallucinogenic drugs but was distressed to find that, by most accounts, they made music more intense.  He went back to Web MD in search of information on lobotomies, such as how much they cost and whether the aftereffects were really as bad as they seemed.  He considered contacting his old high school band director before deciding that even after giving the Speech he was not up to writing the most awkward email of his life (“Dear Ms. Lackland: How have you been?  So, there’s this song stuck in my head . . .”).

He also tried downloading some free composition software.  Listening to music had failed to solve his problem, but what about writing music?  He tossed a few notes onto the page and played back his new piece, which he had titled: “Ode to a Clear Mind.”  It sounded something like this:

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

After that, he spent a lot of time staring at the ceiling.  He thought about sleeping, since the “Go to bed and feel better in the morning” school of medicine had often served him well in the past.  He certainly wouldn’t have been the first summer law clerk to incorporate nap time into his “busy” schedule.  But what if he dreamed?  After all, dreams reside in the subconscious, and wouldn’t it make sense to think that this is also the lair of the vile Earworm?  What if the tune took over?  What if he never woke up?

Of course, because of his severe lack of sleep the night before, even this horrifying possibility was not enough to prevent his eyelids from sliding shut.  Perhaps fortunately, the mystery song was annoying enough to keep him from ever drifting into actual sleep.  Instead he drifted into an unrestful stupor, the kind airline passengers often find themselves in when they are flying over the Pacific Ocean at 1 AM local time (not that “local time” has any meaning for them at that point).

Shortly before noon the daily baseball game ended, as usual (Pilots 3, Racers 2- a showdown between National League Central Division gutter teams).  As usual, his coworkers came over to invite Peter to lunch, though a bit more hesitantly than usual—after the way he had stood up to the wrath of Abrahamson, some of the other clerks had wondered if he was really human.  As usual, Peter did not accept.  Unlike usual, instead of providing an excuse, he simply said no and made a difficult-to-interpret head motion.  He also said, “Have lunch,” which was probably supposed to be, “Have a good lunch,” but for once in his life Peter was not paying attention to what he was saying.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

Simply coming to work every day
Doesn’t have a whole lot of cachet
But you can make a name
Get in the Hall of Fame
When you come day in, day out to play

Event: Cal Ripken Jr. plays in his 2,131st consecutive game, breaking Lou Gehrig’s record, which had stood for 56 years
Year: 1995
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cal_Ripken_Jr

A. 代衣鼻特　B. 之意藤憶留　C. 子也阿里伊　D. 安弥義依流

I’m posting late again, and it looks like this time the delay didn’t even give anyone the chance to get in a last-second submission.  I will blame the slowness on . . . solar flares.  Or wait, no: a syzygy.  That makes sense.

As penance, I will go through people’s answers in reverse order, because I’m pretending that that’s more difficult for some reason.  Dragon cleverly sidestepped the trap and did not guess that A was Abigail, even though the first character looks a little bit like a collapsing capital “A.”  She is also roughly correct in her guess of how I was rendering her name with Japanese syllables; in this case, “Abigail” becomes abigeeru.  Unfortunately, that’s where her correctness streak ended, because Abigail is actually located at . . . oh wait, she said D.  That’s correct.  Good job.  Now, man’yogana were not intended to be used for their meaning, but if they were, then the name abigeeru here would mean something like “a current of all-the-more restful righteousness and dependency.”

Shirley was half right on her masculine/feminine guesses; A and B are the male names here, and C and D the female.  She may be disappointed that she wasn’t able to pick out her own name, but she shouldn’t be too upset, as it’s one she herself described as lovely, impressive, and charming: C.  In fact, maybe that was what she really intended all along, but modesty forced her to say that she thought this combination of positive attributes belonged to someone else.  Our Japanese rendering of “Shirley” is shiyaarii, which is more complicated than everyone thought it was because we have to use two syllables, shi and ya, to approximate the sound sha.  Of course, the system of man’yogana is over 1300 years old, and it would be silly to assume that all the sounds were pronounced exactly the same back then as the syllables they are associated with today.  For example, what is now sa could very well have been sha back then.  But since we can’t know for sure what it sounded like (recording technology was still relatively primitive in the 700’s), we’ll just go with this.

Shirley’s name is rather more difficult to give a meaningless meaning to, since it involves more obscure characters, but it’s something like “children doth be in a nook about 2.5 miles from Italy.”

We wish that A Fan would be sorry after he made that regrettable pun, but unfortunately his guess was correct: A is deebido, or David.  He is “changing into clothes specially designed to accommodate his nose.”

And now it seems that Theoman finally knows everyone else’s pain, not having the first clue what to do here.  His presumed name is, of course, located at B, and is read (in our modern way) as shiodooru.  He is “fastening together recollections of these ideas of wisteria.”  Sounds very Proustian.

Now that that painful ordeal is behind us, let’s try it again.  Since Shirley seems to be so fascinated with English kings, let’s try picking out some of their names.  Listed below are the four most common names used by the Kings of England, and the one most common name used by Queens of England.  And we’re talking post-Norman Invasion, here, because I don’t know how to pronounce “Æthelberht,” let alone write it in centuries-old Japanese.

A. 位理英牟　B. 閉奴利怡　C. 自与於士　D. 愛梨社倍寸

E. 榎騰和足等

Though some people don’t like to admit it, there are actually a lot of problems in life that can be solved by ignoring them.  If your car gets buried in snow, you don’t need to spend hours digging it out; just wait until spring and you can drive again, as long as you don’t mind having severely rusted brakes and a steering wheel so sluggish you could kill it with salt.  The dumpster outside your house doesn’t have to be emptied every week; eventually one of your neighbors, unable to stand the sight and the smell, will do it for you.  As you can probably imagine, these solutions tend to lead to a whole new set of problems, but the point is that the original undesirable situation was fixed simply by not thinking about it.

Peter’s dilemma was not this kind of dilemma.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

Despite Peter’s trying to focus all his thoughts on baseball, wheat, or anticipatory repudiation, the mystery tune remained stuck in his head for the entire seven-minute, forty-two-second duration of the subway ride (staring at his watch was yet another way in which he had tried to distract himself).  All the while, it kept getting louder.  It also seemed to be getting lazier, for around the four-minute mark it stopped repeating the whole six-second sequence and started “skipping,” playing only the first seven notes over and over again.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

It was a good thing that the few available spaces left in his mind were crammed full of numbers and times, because that was the only way he could have known when to get off the train.  The blaring music made it impossible to make any sense of the stop announcement—not that it would have made any sense on a normal day, either: “MFYXT (static): MREEPARONI PFAZZZZZZ.”  (NEXT STOP: DIPAOLI PLAZA).

The tune was not entirely without its advantages.  It came in very handy when he stepped off the elevator, which he only did because the person next to him nudged him sharply and said something that might have been, “This is your floor, right?”  Or it could have been, “Have you seen my frog suit?”  As a life-long debater, he had always been better at speaking than listening, but that morning his comprehension skills were so sub-par that he was ready to chuck his putter, his driver, and the whole rest of his bag of clubs into the water.  This childish but satisfying mental image tantrum—along with everything else that had gone wrong since he entered the subway—distracted him from the Par-4, 500-yard, double dogleg 18th hole ahead: an outraged Mr. Abrahamson.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

It wasn’t as bad as he thought it would be.  Or, to put it another way, Peter had no idea how bad it was.  Mr. Abrahamson did not shout, scream, snarl, spit or flail his arms around like he was boxing an invisible kangaroo.  That was not his style.  He could take apart a mind much more subtly, like a safecracker.  A seemingly gentle phrase here, a possibly meaningless question there, and before you knew it you would be bawling like a baby and agreeing with anything he said, admitting that you killed Jimmy Hoffa, that you were Jack the Ripper, that you murdered Julius Caesar.

Of course, that was all dependent on you being able to hear a single word he was saying.  To Peter it just looked like he was being calmly lectured by a man with a vaguely disappointed look on his face, every once in a while taking a step to the left or the right, now and again fixing him with a piercing stare that was rather unsettling even though he had no idea what he was talking about.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

“I’m sorry, Mr. Abrahamson.  It won’t happen again.”

Mr. Abrahamson, nodding in mild satisfaction tinged with regret, said, “See that it doesn’t.” (Or possibly, “Word to your mother.”)  After the old man had retreated to the elevator, Peter’s coworkers, who had watched the entire thing from various unsuccessful hiding positions, approached with looks of wonder.

“Dude, that was . . . brutal.”

“I’m surprised you’re still standing.”

“You sure you’re feeling okay?”

“You need a shot of something?  I’ve got a bottle of the good stuff in my cube.”

“It’s no big deal,” Peter said modestly.  “You just have to think of yourself as a rock on the beach and let the waves wash over you.”

That is, that’s what he would have said if he had been able to hear them.  Instead he nodded and smiled, looking like a person with a mild concussion trying to convince everyone that he’s fine.  He said his Hellos and his Good Mornings and quickly worked his way to his cubicle.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum

Though their time is soon coming to close
In the eighties these craft first arose
Now a long-deserved rest
Seems like it would be best
How will we get to space, d’you suppose?

Event: Discovery, the third Space Shuttle orbiter to go into space and the first to be retired, has its maiden launch
Year: 1984
Learn more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_shuttle
Recent Event: STS-135, the final Space Shuttle mission (Atlantis): July 8 (Launch), July 21 (Landing)

A. 明智光秀　B. 石田三成　C. 織田信長　D. 徳川家康　E. 豊臣秀吉

Well, Theoman got them all right again.  However, my guess is that this one actually required a little guesswork and figuring out on his part, so he may be awarded a modicum of praise.

COMMENCE GOLF CLAP.

CLAP.  CLAP.  CLAP.

CEASE GOLF CLAP.

Anyway, on to A Fan, who for some strange reason doubts the historical accuracy of video games.  What about Space Invaders?  That actually happened, didn’t it?  Anyway, he picked A to be Tokugawa because he thought it looked like a winner.  I think the person who had this name must have thought so too, because he believed that he could rule Japan.  History, however, had other plans.  A is the backstabbing Akechi Mitsuhide.  Also, his identification of kamikaze as a significant force in Japanese history (and also as having nothing to do with this period) is correct: this “divine wind” was a typhoon that blew away the invading Mongol fleet in the late 13th century.  D is not Toyotomi, nor Toyota, but we’ll give partial credit because it does start with ‘To.”  Finally, A Fan chose to rely on the movies, which, unlike video games, are 100% historically accurate, all the time, every time.  Just to be clear: none of these are Tom Cruise, and, like the kamikaze, “The Last Samurai” is set in a period far distant from the one currently under discussion (though it was roughly 300 years later instead of 300 years earlier).

Fortunately, Dragon stood up to defend video games and their impeccable historical accuracy.  She conclusively proved that they get all the facts right by getting A right . . . err, wait, no, she didn’t.  Well surely B . . . nope.  How about C . . . looks like not (though I think we can all agree that, had one been available at the time, Tokugawa Ieyasu would have chosen to wield a spear that also fires cannonballs, shoots lasers, and serves as a flamethrower).  Aha!  E!  She got E correct!  It’s Toyotomi Hideyoshi.  This conclusively proves that Samurai Warriors–and, by extension, video games in general–is precisely 20% historically accurate.

Last came Shirley, who put her knowledge of European history and innovative spelling techniques to work in solving the puzzle.  And . . . she got roughly the same results as Dragon, who based her guesses on the video game.  Oh well.  Shirley correctly picked out Ishida Mitsunari as B; the loserest-looking characters for the member of the list most famous for being a loser.  She also got two out of three in her picking A, C, and D as the 3 unifiers, though she jumbled them up a bit and also tossed in Akechi Mitsuhide, who simply believed that he had a chance to be a unifier.  But hey: Hideyoshi thought he was destined to conquer Korea, China, and India.  These folks aren’t exactly boasting sanity in spades, here.

Now, over the years (hey, it’s been more than one year!), there are several topics I’ve considered for KYPC but had to drop because the answers would all be written in katakana, the series of phonetic characters often used to represent non-Japanese names and other words.  For one thing, this would be unfair–well, more unfair than usual–since Theoman can handle them swimmingly and I think Dragon may know a few.  For another, using characters with no supposed “meaning” component would defeat the purpose of the exercise, right?  But I think after 67 weeks we’ve pretty well proved that these self-contained “meanings” are at best obscure.

Way way back, before things like katakana and hiragana were developed, the Japanese had nothing but Chinese characters to use to write words.  There was a system of kanji that were used essentially the same way that katakana are used today (except that they could be used for pretty much any word instead of a specific subset of words); these were called man’yogana.  They’re no longer used, of course, but I figure: why should that stop us?  So let’s try it.  The first experiment in Know Your (Really Phonetic But They Look Like) Picture Characters will be simple: common names.  I have selected the names “Shirley” and “Theodore” for obvious reasons, and then at random I decided to toss in “David” and “Abigail.”  Choose whichever one of these names appeals to you most, for whatever reason, and try to locate it.

A. 代衣鼻特　B. 之意藤憶留　C. 子也阿里伊　D. 安弥義依流

As Peter dropped down onto the subway seat, and the doors slid roughly shut behind him, he could not shake the feeling that not all was right with the world.  Being woken up against one’s will at four in the morning is a crime that no just, caring universe would permit, but he thought that there might be more than just that.

The encounter with the woman was unsettling but not entirely unexpected; as his father liked to say, you can’t have a city of a million and a half people without getting a few unusual characters thrown in.  And it seemed like he had made a clean getaway.  But as the train pulled out of the station, he couldn’t help but wonder: was it an escape, or a retreat?

Peter Hamlin did not run from a fight.  Even on days when he hadn’t spent hours giving a speech persuading people to charge the Black Gate of Mordor or march on Washington or turn their car into a cake, he liked to think that he did not back down from a challenge.  He really didn’t understand the woman’s situation; after all, she hadn’t done a very good job of explaining her problem and was probably crazy to boot.  He had no idea whether he should be fighting against her or the people who wronged her, whoever they were.  In either case, it was hard not to see leaping on the subway just as it was leaving as a way of avoiding the issue rather than facing it.

He told himself that the woman had nothing to do with him, that she probably gave that same crazy speech to everyone who walked through there.  You have to pick your battles, and he had gone for the one he felt had much more to do with his own future.  Peter finally took the glance at his watch that he had first attempted when the woman snagged his arm.

7:56.  He wasn’t going to make it.

No wonder the train was so empty; ordinarily he shouldn’t have been able to sit down, much less have a bench all to himself.  He was going to have to face the wrath of Abrahamson.  He had no idea what it would be like, because none of the clerks had dared to be late before.  His lack of information, however, did not stop him from imagining what fate awaited him when he got off the elevator on the 12th floor.  A lifetime of service as a chained oarsman on an ancient Roman galley?  Or worse, a life sentence to be spent proofreading everything composed by Misters Victorino and Wachowsky?

It would be safe to say that his lack of sleep was affecting his judgment and preventing reality from getting much involved in his imagining the potential punishments.  Sulfur and brimstone may have even made an appearance.

With a groan he dropped his head into his hands—so forcefully, in fact, that it hurt, at least on one side.  He held his left cheek, which still stung a bit from the slap.  That little old woman sure packed a wallop.  His ears were even ringing.

Or was it just ringing?  Between the sound of his own thoughts and the rattling of the train on the tracks, he thought he could just recognize a tune echoing softly.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum, bum ba da dee-da deee, dee-da deee, dee da ba buum

He looked around to see where the sound was coming from, but he couldn’t spot any obvious source.  The itinerant musicians and obnoxious stereo-toting teenagers didn’t usually start to ride the rails until later in the day.  The car was so empty that it would have been blatantly obvious if someone was singing, whistling, or even humming, but the other passengers were just as sullenly inactive as one would expect on a pre-8 AM train ride.  It certainly wasn’t being produced by the PA system, which only ever spat out things like: “MFYXT (static): BRRPON BEEEEEEEEEP” (NEXT STOP: THIRD AND WALKER).

If it wasn’t coming from outside his head, then there was only one other possibility.  It didn’t seem very likely either, because Peter couldn’t think of any place he had ever heard the tune before.  He supposed that was often the way when you get a song stuck in your head, but no matter how hard he thought about it, he couldn’t identify its origin.  It wasn’t from a movie.  It wasn’t a song that regularly came up on the radio in the carpool.  It wasn’t the annoying jingle from an even more annoying TV commercial.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum, bum ba da dee-da deee, dee-da deee, dee da ba buum

The tune itself wasn’t particularly unpleasant, but it was short, and it kept repeating over and over again, and the more he heard it the more it got on his nerves.  Where did it come from?  Peter was positive he had never heard it before, not even as the background music from a cartoon he had watched in elementary school, which had  lain dormant for the past fifteen years before suddenly reappearing that morning.  He did another, more thorough check for external sources, looking out the windows, under his seat, into the creepy room at the end of the car that seems like it should have someone in it but never does.  He even searched the other passengers (from a distance—thankfully he wasn’t that out of his mind) for headphones, thinking it was possible that someone had turned them up to an eardrum-rupturing, blood-vessel-bursting volume that could be heard across the car, but no luck.

And as he searched, he could swear that the tune was getting louder.

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum, bum ba da dee-da deee, dee-da deee, dee da ba buum

He tried humming another song, otherwise known as the Escalation Method of Song Unsticking.  The ones he tried were real doozies, too, tunes so horrifyingly catchy that it would be inappropriate to repeat them here.  But no matter what he tried, the moment he stopped humming, the mystery tune came back, louder than before.  He wasn’t even sure how a sound that was only inside his head could be louder or softer, but it was definitely louder.

After a couple minutes he gave up.  The only way to get a song out of your head, he decided, was to think about something else entirely.  So he stopped humming other things and focused on baseball: a depressing topic for a Crescentonian, but also one that it was really easy to get worked up about.  Surely, with his mind distracted by thoughts of how terrible the Gems were, the unknown tune would eventually work its way out of his system, right?  Right?

Bum ba da da dee ba buuum, bum ba da dee-da deee, dee-da deee, dee da ba buum