Yes, I Really Am A Huge Geek

"Ask Carol, she'll know the answer," I overheard my teacher Ranya telling a fellow student asking about some random something-or-other. "Or at least," she added, "She'll be able to tell you where to find the answer."

Yeah, OK, so I'm a Know-It-All. But not really. I'm probably more of a Would-Like-To-Know-It-All -- or, more accurately, a Has-An-Insatiable-Curiosity-About-Random-Stuff-It-All.

This may have less to do with a desire for knowledge than with a transient indiscriminate obsessiveness about anything that catches my fancy.

In other words, once something lights my fire, I get such a boner to know everything about it, that not doing so leaves me with what can only be described as mental blueballs.

For example, my mime teacher recently sent me this adorable "hand dancing" video ...



... which is done to a song in Italian.

I forwarded it to my father, who wrote back:  "Very entertaining and imaginative. Do you know what the song is about?"

Well ... I didn't.

I know Italian well enough but, except for a few words, I couldn't make heads or tails of it. And I just HAD to know why (as well as absolutely everything else about the song).

After a half-hour's obsessive research and link compilation, I wrote back:

The song is called "Tu Vuò Fà L'Americano" ("You Want to Make [Like] an American") and it's actually in Neapolitan so it's pretty hard for me to make out, but the Wikipedia entry tells all about it. [Side note: Wikipedia, by the way, is like heroin to someone like me -- but truth be told, I was this way long before the internet made my indulgences so damned quick and easy.

Anyway.]

The song is apparently about a guy who is pretending to be an American (drinking whiskey & soda, smoking Camels, playing rock & roll, but all the time he is living "out of his mother's purse").

And you can see the lyrics here.

Google translate should be able to render the bottom part readable, as that is in Florentine Italian, but not much of the song itself.

The song used in the video is actually a remix of the 1956 original by Renato Carosone.

The remix is by an Australian duo Yolanda Be Cool (the reference is to Pulp Fiction, when Samuel L. Jackson's character Jules tells Amanda Plummer -- Yolanda -- to "be cool" in the diner scene).

Here is their very cute video.

And... as to the hand dancers themselves ... well I only had about a half-hour for this and had to get some real work done, so it was not included in the email to my dad.

But of course I had to look it up later. So....

They are Up and Over It -- an Irish step dance duo, Suzanne Cleary and Peter Harding, who "aim to stretch the concept of Irish Dance to its limits".

And that they do!!