Ever since I first saw "Sweet Love" on Music Video Connection as a youngster, Anita Baker has been in my top 10 favorite R&B singers of all time. However, in the tradition of greats like Michael Jackson, James Brown and Michael McDonald, she has one "drawback" to her delivery: when she gets excited, her ability to enunciate suffers a bit. Exhibit A: in the verse following the bridge on her 1990 single "Talk to Me", it always sounded like she was saying "hacienda"; in actuality, she says "across your face". Right before going into the last round of chorus repetition, I always thought she said "you avoid my rush, you avoid my race, baby" when the factually correct translation is "you avoid my advice, you avoid my embrace, baby". In all fairness, I don't have the best hearing in the world due to years of listening to music in my headphones nearly at full blast and only grasping the concept of protecting one of my greatest assets within the last decade. Nevertheless, I know I'm not the only one who has looked at her like, "What the heck did you just say, lady?" Now that I've graduated summa cum laude from The Big Dadi Scribbler School of Lyric Translation, let's roll with the rest of the nonsense--and trust, I do mean nonsense...
The easy part of doing "RANDOM THOUGHT ALERTS!!!" is sifting through my brain to recall the most random thoughts and observations throughout the week or month that will tickle every one of you who actually entertain me. However, the hard part is figuring out an interesting introductory paragraph, but like everything else about this series, things just happen by the grace of God and often out of nowhere. Hence, we have a lovely Maryland license plate and I'm sure you're wondering what's the significance of it. Well, here's a secret about me: I'm a numbers fanatic and looking at the back of license plates allows me to feed my fetish. The game is simple: I take the bigger number, divide it by the smaller number and see if I can get a quotient without a remainder. I cannot in this case, but the way that my brain is setup, I said to myself, "If that bigger number was 9045, then the quotient would be 1005." I'll break it down even further by a number like 3, 5, or 15 and come up with further quotients like 335, 201 and 67, respectively--and this is all in my head. Yup...been this much of a certified dork since 1987, but I bet you'll ask me to figure out the tip at dinner instead of wasting your time with a calculator. Now when you start talking calculus, that's the only time in my life when I needed a tutor, so I might not be the guy you wanna talk to about that. With that said, let's get random, kiddies and ducklings...
