Bonus addition to Granite State of Mind

Today on the radio I heard a smackdown improv addition to something that's been setting YouTube on fire, with a million views this week: Granite State of Mind. The guy was asked to rhyme "Winnepesaukee" on the spot, and he aced it. :-)

Read on.

A huge YouTube success has been hip-hop artist Jay-Z's homage to his home town, Empire State of Mind, featuring Alicia Keys, with 36 million views. (See it here.)

A hugely successful parody hit YouTube ten days ago: "Granite State of Mind" by SSP (Super Secret Project). It already has almost a million views:



(Interestingly, in the parody the lyrics sync much better with the rhythm than they do on Jay-Z's original.)

Today on WBUR's "Radio Boston" Karen Pelland ran a great interview with SSP about what a hoot this is. (Audio here. To hear this segment you can move the slider to 41:45.) At 47:50 she wraps up with one last thought:

"Even though you got a TON of both obscure and well-known New Hampshire references [into the song], there's a couple that I thought, 'I would have liked to have heard them.' So... I'm gonna throw down this challenge. Could you craft a rhyme right now that gets in the greatest of the lakes, Lake Winnipesaukee?"

In seconds he said "All right... here we go" and came back with this:

Catch me at the Whittemore
for Wildcats Hockey
but wishin I was fishin on
Winnepesaukee

Awesome. Great work, SSP.

Take THAT, Penn and Teller

Okay, I don't speak Chinese, but I don't think that's necessary...



As the old magician's wisecrack goes, "Notice how my fingers never leave my hand."

(Email subscribers: if you can't see the video above, click here to view it online.)

"Graceful consort!" from Haydn's The Creation

My good friend Lucy Jo Palladino wrote Find Your Focus Zone, a great book that combines old and new research into advice on finding just the right level of background stimulation so that your particular mind can comfortably accomplish things. She's wonderful, and the book's wonderful: it works.

I seem to like Bach, and while scrounging on YouTube I ran across this, which isn't Bach. It's just lovely; I keep playing it over and over in my new noise-cancelling earphones, as I work. Enjoy.