718- 387-xxxx
If they started in 1983 then the number must have changed because the 718 area code was not created until September 1984. Also the 387 NXX was not introduced until 1994.
2015 will see the internet finally replace an answering machine that uses cassettes as its storage medium, or at least the answering machine used by alt.rock outfit They Might Be Giants' iconic Dial-A-Song service. They Might Be Giants created Dial-A-Song in 1983 when one member broke his wrist and the other's home was burgled …
Sure, you can very easily create a website that displays a different song every day. Hell, you can automate it, load it up with a million songs and leave it for all eternity. But it really loses something compared to dialling in to someone's house and listening to a song they've specially put onto the tape for people.
If they had it all self-hosted and you knew that the song you're hearing today was specifically chosen and put there by the band, it might keep some of it's soul. But since it seems all the songs are readily available on YouTube and they're just pulling them in probably at random, it really does lose idiosyncratic charm and personal care.
Yes, the lyrics are hardly difficult to interpret, particularly if you ask your friendly reference librarian for help with the more obscure references. What are they teaching in schools these days?
I'm having trouble thinking of a TMBG song that isn't pretty clear with a modicum of thought. "Minimum Wage", maybe.
That is not the weirdest lyric by any stretch of any imagination in any universe.
"Dr worm", "I palindrome I", "the triangle man song.", "Minimum wage" To name some of the other oddities.
They do a kid friendly matinee on stage with the "Avatar of They" glove puppet (hence my name on this forum) and are completely mental.
They are scientists as well, adding healthy (proper actual science) science in songs and on stage "the sun is a ball of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace." became "the sun is a miasma of ever changing plasma" etc. As science moved on our understanding about the sun. :)
I never knew any of the dial a song stuff apart from their compilation album having that name. Makes a lot more sense now to some of the references in there.
Thanks Reg - have a beer.
Triangle man was about wrestling wasn't it ? Bless Loony Tunes !
The song's title is "Particle Man", and the cartoon in question is part of an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures, not the older WB Loony Tunes series. It's a good one, though, with Plucky Duck in the eponymous role.
The wrestling interpretation used by the TTA writers is a variant reading that doesn't fit particularly well with the entire text. A less-resistant reading is probably just to see the song as the typical TMBG dream-logic treatment of the four-color-comic superhero genre.
But meaning inheres in the reader, not the text. It can be as much about wrestling as you like.
They could always limit the bandwidth for the audio (Or use Comcast) to simulate the bad quality of a land line with dropped packets. Then they could expand the service into video by doing something like re-record the music videos by way of pointing a VGA-resolution webcam at a television.