Curing a case of earworms

Music has a way of invading your mind. For no reason, without any provocation, it can either mount a full-on assault or the sneakiest kind of covert infiltration. Tunes and lyrics can leach into your subconscious with osmotic determination and take you places you never thought of going. Once they are in your mind, they are difficult to ignore. Some people call them 'earworms' and I know what they mean.

 

An infection of earworms in someone else has prompted these ramblings. Someone who comes to our IT Club related a bad case: she'd been plagued with a snatch of lyrics that had been playing havoc with her mind for a while. She couldn't remember the song, which she associated with her mother, and could I help to track it down? With the lines she could recall, Mr Google soon came up with the rest. It was a George Gershwin number called 'But not for me'. I love the way he rhymes try it/riot and Pollyannas/bananas. The first verse goes:

 

   Old man sunshine listen you

Never tell me dreams come true

Just try it and I'll start a riot

Beatrice Fairfax don't you dare

Ever tell me he will care

I'm certain it's the final curtain

I never want to hear from any cheerful Pollyannas

Who tell you fate supplies a mate

It's all bananas

 
Just to show her what else we could find, we searched under the song title and came up with the following YouTube clip of the Judy Garland version. And, bingo, that was the version she remembers coming out of her mother's gramophone. Another satisfied customer thanks to Mr Google.

And this is where my OCD curiosity kicked in. Once I had solved the mystery of which song it came from, I began to delve more deeply into the question that started to drive me crazy: who was the Beatrice Fairfax mentioned?

 

This, of course, is the kind of query which must have occupied a fair amount of your spare time before the internet age. The Great God Google, however, allows you to wander through the poppy fields of trivia with comparative ease.

 

Beatrice Fairfax was the brainchild of the American author Marie Manning, who invented the name when she initiated America's very first personal advice newspaper column. Readers were invited to address their most intimate problems to "Dear Beatrice Fairfax" protected by nothing but some anonymous initials. Marie Manning started a trend that has been a central feature of journalism ever since. 

 

I suppose the twenty-first century equivalent of Beatrice Fairfax is, in fact, Mr Google himself. Whether we want to know the exchange rate for the Yen, whether or not to tell our nearest and dearest of our proclivity for leather underwear (joke!) or to discover who the hell was Beatrice Fairfax, what we do is to write to "Dear Mr Google".