Everyone gets an earworm once in a while--those catchy but irritating scraps of pop tunes that hang around your head like some disgraceful alcoholic uncle, aggressively challenging you: "If your music taste is so great, why are you always listening to me?"
I never thought I'd say this, but I am now officially nostalgic for the days when my earworms were all written by Vanilla Ice and Haddaway.
You see, last week we visited the local toy library and came back with a one-week lease on a musical walker--basically a push-button panel attached to a baby-sized zimmer frame, which plays an array of tunes, remarks and noises. Anya loves two things above all at present: standing and dancing to music. So this pretty much fulfils all her needs, but the side effect is that Kate and I have its electronic witterings pasted over the insides of our skulls.
Driving back from a friend's house today, we both broke into: "Hello, puppy calling, would you like to play with me? / Let's all sing together as we learn our A.B.C." At random times, the words "Dance to the island beat!" pop into my head, followed by an electronic version of that well-known calypso, "I'm forever blowing bubbles". Or "Rock and roll", followed by a bit of Scott Joplin's "The Entertainer". Whoever designed this thing had a shaky grasp of musical genre.
Of course Anya loves it so I can't complain. And one day she'll grow out of musical toys and I can go back to having Whigfield and MC Hammer taking up my headspace.
But in the mean time, one thing seems particularly uncanny--in the Freudian sense--about this toy. It's got an English accent, a more youthful version of that slightly posh English accent that you hear on train messages and the speaking clock. This just seems wrong. Since I encountered my first Speak n Spell around 1982, there's one thing I've been quite sure of: all toys speak with an American accent.
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