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What Happened to Rod McKuen?

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Re: What Happened to Rod McKuen?

#2
What happened to "Life's little instruction book"? What happened to "Don't sweat the small stuff (and it's all small stuff)"? Every so often some "nice" but vapid book or fad comes along and makes a lot of money from people in that literate but dull IQ range of 104-106 and while it's never fun to smilingly fend off recommendations from well-meaning friends ("You should read this! It's really inspiring!") it's all pretty harmless.

McKuen put a semi-handsome face and a semi-pleasant voice to it and so lasted quite a while.

He's really easy to hate though. I hated him before I even knew his name. He wrote the lyrics to "Seasons in the Sun". Fuck you, Rod McKuen.

Re: What Happened to Rod McKuen?

#3

What happened to "Life's little instruction book"? What happened to "Don't sweat the small stuff (and it's all small stuff)"? Every so often some "nice" but vapid book or fad comes along and makes a lot of money from people in that literate but dull IQ range of 104-106 and while it's never fun to smilingly fend off recommendations from well-meaning friends ("You should read this! It's really inspiring!") it's all pre…

That song sucks.

Re: What Happened to Rod McKuen?

#4

What happened to "Life's little instruction book"? What happened to "Don't sweat the small stuff (and it's all small stuff)"? Every so often some "nice" but vapid book or fad comes along and makes a lot of money from people in that literate but dull IQ range of 104-106 and while it's never fun to smilingly fend off recommendations from well-meaning friends ("You should read this! It's really inspiring!") it's all pre…

> dull IQ range of 104-106

Ouch. That's damning of you. BTW I don't know if being interesting is strongly correlated with IQ anyway.

Re: What Happened to Rod McKuen?

#5

What happened to "Life's little instruction book"? What happened to "Don't sweat the small stuff (and it's all small stuff)"? Every so often some "nice" but vapid book or fad comes along and makes a lot of money from people in that literate but dull IQ range of 104-106 and while it's never fun to smilingly fend off recommendations from well-meaning friends ("You should read this! It's really inspiring!") it's all pre…

What I miss is the ronco egg scrambler, that would scramble eggs in the shell.

Or maybe stretch armstrong (they (lol) pulled him)

I don't miss feelings. ("Feelings, wo oh oh feelings Wo oh oh, feel you again in my arms")

Re: What Happened to Rod McKuen?

#6
post #5

What happened to "Life's little instruction book"? What happened to "Don't sweat the small stuff (and it's all small stuff)"? Every so often some "nice" but vapid book or fad comes along and makes a lot of money from people in that literate but dull IQ range of 104-106 and while it's never fun to smilingly fend off recommendations from well-meaning friends ("You should read this! It's really inspiring!") it's all pre…

What I miss is the ronco egg scrambler, that would scramble eggs in the shell. Or maybe stretch armstrong (they (lol) pulled him) I don't miss feelings. ("Feelings, wo oh oh feelings Wo oh oh, feel you again in my arms")

Just shake it like a maraca, that's what I do for hard boiled scrambled eggs.

Re: What Happened to Rod McKuen?

#7

What happened to "Life's little instruction book"? What happened to "Don't sweat the small stuff (and it's all small stuff)"? Every so often some "nice" but vapid book or fad comes along and makes a lot of money from people in that literate but dull IQ range of 104-106 and while it's never fun to smilingly fend off recommendations from well-meaning friends ("You should read this! It's really inspiring!") it's all pre…

[deleted]

Re: What Happened to Rod McKuen?

#8
> The Spotify algorithm, Amazon’s recommendations, they’ll never, ever show you Rod McKuen. Those are designed to direct you towards things that other people like right now. But thrift stores, used bookshops, and Goodwills are, accidentally, perfectly designed to show you things that people liked decades ago, then stopped liking.

I've often thought of and lamented the former idea. That the serendipity of the algorithms is less serendipitous than browsing a local record store. But what I've not considered much is that we, digital age folk, leave nothing behind. When I was young my mom had a pile of 45 rpm records. It was great browsing through those as a kid, knowing what my mom was into as a teenager. What do we leave our children? Our Spotify account? It's just not the same. Records have character. Worn dust jackets, scratches. A physical human held and cared for these. It's a snapshot of a point in time. Newspaper clippings, ticket stubs, it's all going away. They can look at a long-dead iPhone 3G and wonder what music or videos I played on it.

Re: What Happened to Rod McKuen?

#9

What happened to "Life's little instruction book"? What happened to "Don't sweat the small stuff (and it's all small stuff)"? Every so often some "nice" but vapid book or fad comes along and makes a lot of money from people in that literate but dull IQ range of 104-106 and while it's never fun to smilingly fend off recommendations from well-meaning friends ("You should read this! It's really inspiring!") it's all pre…

> He wrote the lyrics to "Seasons in the Sun".

Went down the Wikipedia rabbit hole and learned that McKuen just translated them from the original French lyrics by Jacques Brel. Terry Jacks rewrote that translation for his popular rendition, which I'm guessing is the version most people hate^H^H^H^H are familiar with.

You can hear McKuen's translation of the original lyrics in The Kingston Trio's version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4CnxktZzjD4

Re: What Happened to Rod McKuen?

#10
post #8

> The Spotify algorithm, Amazon’s recommendations, they’ll never, ever show you Rod McKuen. Those are designed to direct you towards things that other people like right now. But thrift stores, used bookshops, and Goodwills are, accidentally, perfectly designed to show you things that people liked decades ago, then stopped liking. I've often thought of and lamented the former idea. That the serendipity of the algorith…

My partner hates it("clutter"), but this is part of the reason I'll buy a physical book after reading and liking an ebook. Also the reason I dispose of books I don't like in one manner or another. Usually dropping off at little free libraries, unless I think the book is dangerously bad, at which point I will shred it and turn it into compost.
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