Dolberry's Top 20 Songs (Week of 10/13)

I'm a longtime countdown geek. In high school, I would tape Sunday morning countdowns off the radio while we were at church & keep detailed logs of the results. On Sunday nights, while doing my homework, I'd dial in a often static-strained WLS out of Chicago to listen to their Top 10. Then I'd merge all the countdowns I had tabulated w/ my own personal Top 20 to create a composite countdown using some needlessly complex weighting formula. On Monday I'd bring my results in and let my friends know the results. (I imagine there was a lot of breathless anticipation.) Believe it or not, there was one other guy who did the same thing. (Pablo, hope all is well.) Yep, it was a real American high school. Presumably, there was a different, larger, cooler crowd that traveled in orbits different from mine.

Anyway, those were great memories.

One year, the local radio station had a contest to guess the year's Top 3 songs. Ha. Guess? Dude, I wrote them all down. Every single week. Even though my musical tastes had matured somewhat & the station had shifted to Adult Contemporary. I'd spent the better part of a year listening to that hideous Kenny Rogers / Dolly Parton duet, but now it was all going to be worth it. OK, so the prize was only a $500 gift certificate to a local jeweler, which I had no use for. I was going to give it to my mom & hope I could get like 10 cents to the dollar in real money. Even bigger, was the winning. I was going to win a major local contest. There was very little doubt. The only question was how they would assign points to the songs for various weeks. While I enjoyed the creation and calculation of obtuse formulae, I suspected, rightly, that the radio station would keep it simple. I mailed in about 5-6 "guesses" based on various scoring schemes & then waited for New Year's Eve for the annual year-end Top 100 ... and glory.

I'd gone ahead & calculated the Top 100 (assuming a simple #1 = 30 points, #2 = 29, ..., #30 = 1) and for the first few songs, everything was great.

#100 - some lousy Little River Band song. Yeah! I knew that.
#99 Sheena Easton. Check. (turn radio volume way down)
#98 The fourth single of that Hall and Oates album. Heh. Heh. Easy money.

But then somewhere early on, in the 90s, a song was off by a place or two. Then I'd get back on track, or more appropriately the countdown got back on track w/ my results. In the long hours of that New Year's Eve (12/31/82?), probably alone in my room, I figured out the discrepancy. The jerks at W-whatever had defined the year differently than I had. I'd guessed the scoring system, but I hadn't figured on the first countdown of 1982 being the one from the last week of December 1981. Of course, most years it wouldn't even matter. As long as the Top 3 songs were safely in the middle of the year, or just not in that "first" week, I'd've been ok.

Well, as you've certainly guessed by now, that wasn't how it worked out that year. My entry of 1-2-3 was actually 1-2-4. My alternate guesses based on alternate scoring systems were like 1-3-4, 1-2-5, 2-3-4, etc.

As it approached midnight when they were to name the lucky winner my only hope was that no one guessed the Top 3 and that they'd award the prize to whoever came the closest; that is, me. At the time, I was pretty sure my entire 1983 was riding on this moment.

So, before the #1 song the DJ says ... "nobody guessed the Top 3 songs of the year." (yeah!) "So, we had a blind drawing from all the entries and the winner was ..." It was somebody other than me.

This put me off countdowns for a long time.

Actually, until right now. Here's my Top 20 for the week of 10/13/06. (Special thanks to APD for his help w/ this.)

Hey. Welcome.

Of all the teachers I had in nearly 20 years of school, the one that I remember the best was (maybe not surprisingly) one of the last ... Tetsuya Theodore Fujita. Dr. Fujita had a fascinating and exceptionally productive life. His skillful reconstruction of severe weather events (tornadoes, microbursts, hurricanes) through aerial photography greatly increased the understanding of these phenomena. By the time I made it to the University of Chicago, Dr. Fujita was winding down. He had quit taking on doctoral students and IMO was being edged further to the fringes of a faculty that was shifting, or had shifted from, away from the observationally-based research (e.g., Horace Byers, Roscoe Braham) that had built the department's reputation. He still had his lab and he still had a small staff and I never detected even a trace of bitterness re: his status as he entered into his last decade of life in 1988.

He was, by far, the most human of all the U of C faculty, at least from the perspective of this lowly grad student.

He tended to speak in proverbs; and the ones he enjoyed the most popped up frequently in his classes on satellite meteorology. My two favories were:

1. "My way's better. What you think?" - The brilliance of this was he truly believed his way was better, but he was just insecure enough to want some nobody grad student to acknowledge it.
2. "Monkey write Shakespeare. You no write Shakespeare." - The theory here was the long-standing concept that 1,000 monkeys sitting at 1,000 computer terminals, over 1,000 centuries ... would eventually randomly write something brilliant. Dr. Fujita didn't think my odds were as good as the monkeys (follow link for my all-time favorite commercial - the "pointer" one).

So, as I start this blog, I do not set out to beat the monkeys. There probably won't be anything that approachs the brilliance of Shakespeare, let alone the brilliance of that monkey commercial. It will likely be a rather vanilla recounting of events/issues/things that I find interesting. Per the name, I intend for it to be cheery as well. There's enough depressing stuff on the internet. If nothing else, it'll be good mental exercise to write.