Goo Goo Dolls "Long Way Down"

When my Mom heard that I have a blog, she told me:

"Oh, I'd like to tune into that sometime."

Mom, though sincere, is not necessarily hip or techie.

But every once and a while, she can surprise you.

Like the time we were in an Irish pub, and she requested that the singer do "Don't Think Twice, It's Alright." I would have bet all the money in my pocket that she couldn't name 3 Bob Dylan songs.

Or there was the time that she visited me in Virginia.

It was the mid-90s, and I was the host of an Alternative radio program, on an independent station in southwest Virginia.

Mom thought it would be fun to spend the evening at the station with me. And she was curious to try email.

At that time, email was pretty new, for the average Baby Boomer. She didn't have a home computer or anything, but she thought it was "neat" that I was writing, electronically, to my sister Julie.

So I sat her down in front of the station computer and went to work on my show. Every once and a while, I'd check in with her, as she did her hunt-and-peck, tip-typing a note to my sister.

When she said she was ready to send, I gave it a look over, and furrowed my brow.

After some chit-chatting type things about what she had seen on this visit, and a knock on the cleanliness of my apartment, before closing, she wrote:

"Long way down, I don't think I'll make it on my own."

That sounded familiar, but I had to spin my mental hamster wheel for a second to get it.

"Mom? Are you quoting the Goo Goo Dolls here?"

I'd played the new-ish song "Long Way Down," sometime within the last half-hour, I guess the lyric struck her for some reason.

Could she name ONE Goo Goo Dolls song? No. Certainly not.

But, just for the fact that she was listening, she did become just a little, tiny, teeny bit cool.




Once she "tunes in" to my blog, it's only a matter of time before Mom is on Facebook.

Jimmy Buffett "Fins To The Left"

You know, being thoughtful and creative isn't only for naming your band.

You can really screw yourself by being creative, but not fully thoughtful, when coming up with your email address.

When my girlfriend had become my fiancee about to be my wife, we started combining things, like bank accounts and bills and such. And just as we had our own shower curtains and knife blocks and copies of Jeff Buckley's "Grace," we had our own email addresses.

But while the extra copies of that other stuff could be sold in a yard sale, we decided to start fresh on the email front, and create a combined address.

We ran through various permutations of our combined names, but either it was already taken, or it was too weird or too hard to remember.

Then we struck on the idea of a play on my last name, "Finn." And we both like Jimmy Buffett, so, hey!

"Fins To The Left"!

Fun Buffett song, terrible email address.

It only took a couple of weeks to figure out that it's a pretty long email address to have to type and re-type.

And not much longer than that to figure out that a sentence, as an email address, is really hard to explain over the phone, to say, a customer service person. Particularly if they don't know the song. Or that MY Finn has to N's.

And it only took a little longer to realize that we were kind of stuck with the silly name, unless we wanted to change our online bank account, cable account, mortgage account, phone bill, and any number of multiple mailing lists we're on.

We are, and for the foreseeable future will be, Finns To The Left.

I know how The Goo Goo Dolls must feel.