OCD Earworm Thursday

I don’t know if earworms are a manifestation of OCD, but I sure have them a lot. It’s also getting much worse as I grow older. OK, an earworm is a song that plays repeatedly in your head.

Right now, my earworm is a song called “Call Paul” by former American Idol winner Taylor Hicks. This song is played during The Paul Finebaum Show on the SEC Network. This is a talk show where viewers/listeners can call in; Finebaum also interviews guests who are almost always not in the studio. From the Wikipedia article about Finebaum:

“In July 2019, Buddy Martin, a respected journalist, and now editor of GatorBait Magazine, conducted a poll at SEC Media Days among media members and found Finebaum to be the most influential member of the SEC media, and it was nearly unanimous. ‘Nobody else was even close,’ Martin wrote. Alan Blinder, who covers college football for the New York Times, voted three times. 1. Paul Finebaum, 2. Paul Finebaum and 3. Paul Finebaum. Mike Bianchi of the Orlando Sentinel was even stronger: ‘Paul Finebaum is not only the ‘Most Influential’ member here – he’s the `Most Influential’ in all of college football.'”

I’m not sure why I watch the show as I don’t have a dog in the SEC fight. I do have some interest in college football, but my favorite team (Nebraska) has been irrelevant for almost 20 years, so my interest is much less than it was when I was a teenager, for example. Finebaum does have some excellent guests who talk about schools outside the SEC as well as college football in general. Maybe my fascination comes from my view that Finebaum is orders of magnitude more intelligent than the vast majority of his callers. One should note that Finebaum, who began his career as a newspaper journalist, has been hosting a call-in sports show for almost 30 years and some of his listeners/callers have been with him from the beginning.

I wish I could find a cite for this, but I remember hearing or reading that in most of the states with colleges/teams in the SEC, say from Louisiana to Florida/Georgia, 25% of all males aged 18-64 regularly listen/watch Paul Finebaum’s show. (Reportedly, he is paid $2 million per year.)

Anyway…the refrain from “Call Paul” doesn’t bother me as much as the verses which are nothing but an effort to mention every SEC school. I am not a fan of “gimmick” lyrics. I am not really a fan of music with lyrics, period. Almost everything I listen to is instrumental.

I wish that damn song would leave my brain!

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On this day in 1929 a fire roared through the Los Angeles Auto Show. In minutes, the entire show was engulfed in flames and by the time the fire department got things under control half an hour later, more than $1 million worth of vehicles, more than 320 in all, had been reduced to twisted metal and ashes.

One of the cars that was destroyed was the only Auburn Cabin Speedster. From theoldmotor.com (not a secure site) a picture of that car:

The original Auburn Cabin Speedster was built by the Griswold Body Co., a medium-sized bodymaker based in Detroit. Griswold produced low-volume bodies for manufacturers who didn’t want to slow their production lines with special jobs like the Cabin Speedster.

The identity of the actual designer is, apparently, a mystery. The Cabin Speedster was an aluminum-bodied car powered by a 299 cubic-inch straight-eight Lycoming engine producing 125 HP.

Auburn, like fellow E.L. Cord makes Cord and Duesenberg, disappeared during the Great Depression of the 1930s. As has been written here ad nauseam, fewer companies building cars means fewer sources of innovation for styling and for engineering. The loss of the E.L. Cord automobile company is a sad part of automotive history.

#PaulFinebaum

#AuburnCabinSpeedster

#somanycarsjustonelife

#disaffectedmusings

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