Napoleon XIV – "They're Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!" (1966)

And I'll be happy to see those nice young men

In their clean white coats

And they're coming to take me away

They say that it’s an ill wind that blows no one any good.

As bad as the coronavirus pandemic has been, there is one good thing you can say about it: it gives you an excuse for just about any sin of omission or commission that you need an excuse for.  

A lot of excuses fall into the dog-ate-my-homework category – they just aren’t credible.  

But no one’s going to question a coronavirus-based excuse for not doing something . . . or for doing something badly . . . or for just about anything.

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Scroll down and take a look at the previous 2 or 3 lines post, which is dated Friday, April 17.

Then keep scrolling until you get to my Tuesday, March 31 post.

You’ll see that both those posts not only feature the same song, but that content is about 99% identical.

WTF?

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I try to always have two or three 2 or 3 lines posts (see what I did there?) ready to publish. 

But as Willie Nelson once wrote, it’s funny how time slips away.  Sometimes I find myself with nothing ready when the next Tuesday or Friday – which are the two days I usually post – rolls around.

When that happens, I have to sit down, crank out a post, and immediately put it up on 2 or 3 lines.

I use to draft my posts right in the Blogger program I use to publish my blog.  But that can result in a lot of odd little glitches in the final product, which used to drive me crazy.  

So now I draft my posts in Word and cut and paste the text into Blogger.  I then add links, photos, and videos.  Once everything is ready, I hit the “publish” button and sit back and relax.

Last Friday morning – April 17 – I realized I had no finished post ready to be published.  So I went to my drafts folder to see if there were any draft posts that I had previously started but not completed. (Sometimes I write an entire post in one sitting, but other times I do part of it one day and the rest of it another day – and that second day might be weeks later.) 

Turns out it was my lucky day.  I found a draft post about how the lack of sporting events during the current pandemic made things difficult for people who loved to bet, and which suggested that instead of betting on a Yankees-Red Sox game, hardcore gamblers could bet the over-under on how many pounds the average American would gain during the current self-quarantine period.  (The song I chose to feature in that post was “Go Down Gamblin’,” by Blood, Sweat & Tears.)  

I revised my draft post, cut and pasted it to Blogger, grabbed some suitable photos, added the necessary links, and hit publish.  Easy-peasy.

Then I went back to binge-watching the most recent seasons of Game of Thrones, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and Succession   (I had a seven-day free-trial subscription to HBO, so there was no time to waste.)

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The next day, I happened to scroll past my Tuesday, March 31, post.  Lo and behold, it was pretty much the same post I had published the day before.  (Bonus points if you know why I said “Lo and behold” in that sentence.)

That’s because when I saw the draft of that post in my drafts folder on April 17, I forgot that I had already finalized and published it on March 31.  

I occasionally will unintentionally feature a song that I have featured before.  Since I’ve featured over 1500 songs in the ten-plus years that my wildly successful little blog has been in existence, it’s not too surprising that I might use a song in a 2018 post that I had already used in a 2011 post.

This time, I not only featured the same song that I had featured barely two weeks ago, I used the same post.

Actually, the two posts aren’t identical.  I started with the same draft text, but the revisions I did before publishing the two posts are subtly different.

What’s more interesting is that I chose completely different photos for the two posts.

(I could give you links to the two “Go Down Gamblin’” posts, but it’s easier if you just scroll down if you want to compare them to one another.)

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After I discovered my error, you might have thought that I would delete the duplicate post and give my readers the fresh new content that they so richly deserve.

No siree, Bob – not this guy.

I not only left the two near-identical posts up, but wrote this post about how the two duplicates came to be.

In other words, I not only turned one post into two, I turned one post into three.  That’s just good old American ingenuity, boys and girls!

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I’m not worried about those nice young men in their clean white coats coming to take me away to funny farm just because I forgot that I had already published the “Go Down Gamblin’” post, but they’ll no doubt find other reasons to drop by soon enough.

“They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” was a huge hit for Napoleon XIV – really Jerry Samuels – in 1966.  (I had just finished 8th grade when it was released, so I was the perfect age to enjoy it.)

Click here to listen to “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!”

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: