Dinah Writes with a JavaBean

Dr. Dobb's Journal December, 2004

To create complications,
She often changed her URL;
When SMSing, she wouldn't text to AOL;
PGP'd her chat line,
Spelled out her @ sign...

...and so forth.

Song parodies, tech writing: There's a connection, but what is it, exactly? This fall, my personal favorite computer columnist, Liverpool-born Stan Kelly-Bootle, left a poignant message on a site where he'd been continuing his long-running "Devil's Advocate" column. Announcing his imminent departure for the old sod, Stan adds, "Will Ye No Come Back Again? Not a question I can answer with certainty at the moment. I do have a return air-ticket from London Heathrow to SFO."

Stan has parallel careers as a technology writer and a singer/songwriter. You can find his folkish songs under the name Stan Kelly on albums by Judy Collins and others. His computer writing shows his gift for language and parody: He's the only writer I know who could—and did—get away with appropriating Ambrose Bierce's title Devil's Dictionary. It became the Devil's DP Dictionary in Stan's hands, and his entry, for example, for "endless loop" reads: "See LOOP, ENDLESS," and his entry for "loop, endless" reads: "See ENDLESS LOOP." An endless loop, we also learn, is a DYNAMIC HALT if it's my endless loop, or an ELEMENTARY BLUNDER if it's yours.

Reading Stan's old columns got me to thinking about my own compulsion to write about computer topics in the form of song parodies. I've often given in to this compulsion over the years, once resulting in a six-stanza, six-topic parody of Don McLean's "American Pie." That song seems to be a particular favorite of parodists, but I've never seen one that covers as many topics as my "Dirges in the Dark," which waxes nostalgic over the days of Steve Ciarcia's "Circuit Cellar" hardware hacking projects ("When I thought that I could take a chance with that old electron dance"), satirizes the dot-com bubble ("Do you believe in K and R, can coding save my house and car"), chronicles Steve Jobs' rise and fall and re-rise ("While John and Gil both turned a page, Jeff Goldblum pranced upon the stage, and lime computers were the rage"), champions free speech in the face of Intellectual Property suits ("Now you can't even post a link but you might end up in the clink"), laments the sad end of the browser war ("Bill is nimble, Bill is quick, Bill has never missed a trick"), and sings the blues for the HP Way ("I went down to the gadget store where I'd bought oscilloscopes before, but the man there said they'd spun that business off"). I've posted it at http://www.ddj.com/documents/s=7027/ddj0204v/. Explanations of the more obscure references are at Swaine's World (http://www.swaine.com/).

Song parodies are traditionally used for political messages, too: Witness the hilarious parody of Woody Guthrie's "This Land Is Your Land" by JibJab that was all over the net this summer. Unfortunately, my own political song parody "Don't it Make my Red States Blue" didn't get completed in time for the election. Or fortunately: I'm on more comfortable ground with technological content.

Other columnists have this same compulsion, I've noticed. David Pogue has been writing about Apple forever and his work regularly appears on The New York Times site, but unless I've overlooked something, his contributions there have all been prose. Elsewhere, he cuts loose: "Don't cry for me, Cupertino," Pogue has Steve Jobs belt out in Madonna mode, "The truth is I never left you." His "Jinglebells" parody has a simple charm: "Microsoft, Microsoft, Bloatware all the way."

Visiting Jeff Duntemann's site (http://www.duntemann.com/) reminds me that techish song parodies are also a science-fiction tradition, much honored at SF conventions. Check out Jeff's parody of the Wiffenpoof's song and notice how he strikes just the right note with the line "Makes us say Awww shucks and phoooey."

"Sex Nuts Posting on an Open Wire," "Should I Ship or Should I Slip?" "Emacs Wizard," "The Devil Went Down to Sunlab," "Losing my Connection," there are a million of 'em on the Web. One thing I notice, though: Nearly all of the parodied songs are OLD. Why? There are plenty of contemporary artists writing lyrics that are ripe for parody: I think of Tom Waits' "Metropolitan Glide" and Green Day's "American Idiot," for example. Could some DDJ reader perhaps write a clever tech song parody based on one of those?

(Speaking of old songs, for those whose memories don't extend as far back as my memory lapses do, the snippet at the top of this column plays off Queen's "Killer Queen.")