During the lonely summer months when network television has abandoned me, I search for anything to tide me over.

I play video games, watch reruns of What I Like About You, Gilmore Girls and Star Trek: TNG, and I desperately search for something new (some good, and some bad).

This led me to the discovery that my TiVo is quite capable of showing me YouTube videos on my giant television.  Although YouTube is hardly a new invention, I have never really embraced the phenomenon.  I can always find better things to do on my computer than watch videos.

But watching videos on my television?  Well that’s an entirely different beast.  So I embarked and soon found myself subscribed to Marina Orlova, host and proprietor of HotForWords.

The premise of her website and videos are simple — discussion of the origin of certain words, what they mean, and what they used to mean.

Marina is a philologist by trade so she’s not just some fly-by-night internet researcher.  Her love for words makes her ’students’ hot for words, and there is no better motivator for learning.

Sure it doesn’t hurt that she has a sexy Russian accent and looks like a super model, but it’s really the content that got me to to subscribe.  Learning is fun, and learning in bite-sized chunks is even better.

That long introduction of HotForWords was really to get to a discussion about one of Marina’s latest videos:

This video discusses the meaning and origin of the word mondegreen. It is a word I believe I have come across before but I don’t think I could have told you the meaning before watching this video.

For those unwilling to watch the hot Russian girl above (seriously, what is wrong with you!?), a mondegreen is the mishearing or misinterpretation of a phrase, typically a standardized phrase such as a lyric.

I can’t remember all of the mondegreens I have come across in my life, but I know they are plentiful. From my youth, I can particularly remember mishearing a line in “Part of Your World” from The Little Mermaid.

The real line goes, “Bright young women, sick of swimming, ready to stand!” but I always heard it as “Pregnant women, sick of swimming, ready to stand!”

I always just assumed it was some sort of reference to Ariel’s unspoken desire to be a mother.

From the video, I have definitely been guilty of “Hold me closer Tony Danza.” I think the first time I heard Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer”, I had no idea what he was saying.  Given his preferences, I figured it was perfectly plausible that he had written an ode to Tony Danza.

What are some mondegreens that you’ve been guilty of? With all of the singing of pirate songs and rock concerts you people go to, surely you’ve run into a few.

My friend Kerry over at Hemisphire is one of those crazy people who is fighting the crowds for the inaugaration festivities.

In fact, not only is he fighting the crowd today but he also fought it on Sunday for some of pre-inaugaral festivities.

He wrote a post about about it which you can read to get his full experience, but I want to extract this one statement:

“Bruce Springsteen was moving and U2 was rocking, but I would never have guessed the guy who got the crowd going was Garth Brooks covering ‘American Pie’ and ‘Shout’.”

I’m not surprised in the least. As I have posited before, Garth Brooks is one of the most important artists in American history. Of course he got the crowds going — he’s a modern day Elvis.

Making such grandiose claims about Mr. Brooks relevance was a hotly debated topic the first time around.  It seemed to hinge on the definition of ‘important’ and ‘impactful.’

I concede that Brooks’ musical stylings are not all that innovative.  He is obviously heavily influenced by his forerunners and would probably readily admit as much.

But as far as being a performer, a star, a celebrity — Garth Brooks can only be bested by a few musical acts in American history.

I don’t bring this up to debate it again.  I just wanted to let Kerry know that he shouldn’t be surprised at all and that I could have predicted it.

Okay. Maybe I don’t really hate it. I just hate to watch year after year and see the best contestants get voted off.

I’m pretty anti-social and my general stance on people other than myself (and those few who have proven otherwise) is that they’re all morons.

American Idol proves how moronic America really is. Every single year.

The only seasons that America had even half a brain were Seasons one & four.

I’m not a big fan of Kelly Clarkson, but I’ll admit she’s a bona fide artist at this point.

And, of course, I think the world of Carrie Underwood who is — by my estimation — the most worthy American Idol winner ever.

The year after Carrie, Chris Daughtry got an early boot when he should have won. And who won instead? Taylor Hicks.

Seriously, I don’t understand the reasoning people use when voting for these contestants. I’m willing to concede that not every one has to have the same taste in music, but it’s not always about musical genre.

It’s about actual talent. There are haves and have-nots when it comes to a fantastic singing voice, and the division is generally very very clear.

But apparently no one’s ears work as well as mine, because I’m continually disappointed by the decisions made by the loyal viewers of idol.

This year we had a final six of Jason Castro, Syesha Mercado, Brooke White, David Cook, David Archuleta and Carly Smithson.

That’s a solid final six, but let’s face facts. Both Syesha and Jason are amateurs compared to the other four. Their voices are weak, their choices are boring, and they have no real chance in the world of music.

Yet somehow, Carly got voted out. Carly; the woman who has the best female vocals by far in this year’s competition.

Brooke couldn’t even sing her song right, yet somehow she got voted through. She’s a snotty, arrogant little brat who constantly interrupts the judges and is in all other ways rude from what I’ve seen on Idol.

Yet America persists. Bunch of morons.

What?! A concert review from me?! But I only do movies. Why would I ever branch out into a concert review? Cuz it’s my blog darnit and I’ll write what I want.

I’m no music connoisseur. I’ve gone to only a handful of concerts in my life and most of those have been Country. But this weekend I watched the Charleston, WV version of Love, Pain and the Whole Crazy Carnival Ride.

I saw both Carrie Underwood and Keith Urban, but I’m going to write up the concerts in separate reviews so I can show off more awesome pictures. The stage has a catwalk that comes out into the middle of the arena and our seats were right on the cat walk halfway down. It was amazingly close.

First up was Carrie and she had a lot of costume changes. I’ve never been to a concert where there was even one costume change, much less 5.

Carrie only has 2 albums, so she really doesn’t have a whole lot to work with. She pretty much ran through every song she has in her 1.5 hours on stage.

Although she pulled out the guitar a few times, Carrie is clearly not a guitarist. She is, first and foremost, a vocalist.

I watched Carrie on American Idol back in the day (a whopping 3 years ago) and I’ve always thought her voice was pretty amazing. She proves it at her concert. I have never heard any artist sound so good live. Her voice was flawless.

Some credit probably goes to her sound techs for making sure she sounded good above the music, but you can’t ignore the fact that she just has an amazing and consistent voice. Other than the screams, you’d be hard pressed to tell the difference between a song off of her album and the way she sings it live.

Although her voice is a wonder to behold, she clearly hasn’t gotten the hang of live performance. She used the catwalk sparingly and even when she did, she looked uncomfortable.

The guards wouldn’t let anyone stand at the catwalk, so you had to stand at your seat. There was no chance of getting her to shake your hand or flash you a smile.

She seemed pretty self-conscious about who she did pick out in the audience. They were almost always children. Guess she doesn’t wanna give any stalker-types the wrong idea…

Those are minor nitpicks for a great concert, though. She was a lot of fun to watch and when she was on the main stage she looked comfortable and happy.

She apparently has good fashion sense, too, because my wife walked away with a couple of fashion ideas. Of course, I didn’t even notice…

If you don’t like country, then obviously this might not be your cup of tea. But if you do want to see a display of some of the finest vocals in the business, you can’t go wrong with Carrie Underwood.

If you’ve been reading my blog for any length of time, you must have seen my post on my Stalker Days.

Well, recently I was going through my Google Analytics for this site and was surprised to see that I had a few incoming links from dixiechicksfans.net.

Intrigued, I desperately hunted down where exactly on that site I could possibly be linked from. Afterall, I don’t even go by the same ‘call sign’ as I did back then, and I wandered away from the Dixie Chicks online community some time ago.

After a modest amount of searching, I found this thread which is posted by someone who stumbled across my Stalker Days post and connected the dots.

Not a lot of responses to the thread, but it totally stoked me to find out that people remembered me fondly from those days.

I registered on the site, but have thus far not been approved to post.

If I’m understanding correctly, the webmaster of the site is the same who started “Emily Robison, You Rock!” in the same spirit as my own “Natalie Maines, Will You Marry Me?” so we have some history.

Anyway, this tie back to my past has encouraged me to do something I’ve considered doing before.

I’ve migrated the entire NMWYMM site over to my domain here and put it up at http://natalie.lykaon.com. I’ve made a few changes to some broken links and updated the contact information as well.

This will make sure I never lose the site and can keep it tied in with my online web presence.

Many may ask why I would want to, but despite the zany name of the site, I maintain that it was a successful foray into online fandom that I should be proud of.

Surprisingly, my wife has encouraged me to update the site with a Web 2.0 sensibility and add some features to draw in new crowds (such as the awesome idea of an Adrian Pasdar interactive voodoo doll).

Although the Chicks have fallen out of grace with country radio, and I even have my own differing opinion from Natalie these days, I’ll always miss those days when it was just me, the Internet, and my love for Natalie Maines.