The Road to Trivia.

For some unaccountable reason I’ve had The Seekers’ mega hit The Carnival is Over humming in my head all day. (I could understand it if I’d been dreaming about the priestess, but I haven’t. The only woman who regularly haunts my dreams these days is sublimely unaware of the fact, and she lives much closer than Australia.) So I did a bit of digging and came up with two bits of trivia:

1. Did you know that The Carnival is Over was written by Dusty Springfield’s brother and set to a tune based on the Russian folk song Stenka Razin? That’s pretty heavy, isn’t it, especially when you consider that Putin has been sending warplanes to bomb the rebels in Syria?

2. While contemplating my erstwhile relationship with Australia, I came to the startling realisation that everywhere on the planet lies in two directions from everywhere else. So if you live in Upstate New York and say ‘Providence, RI lies east of here,’ you’d only be half right.

(Oh, and it seems Springfield got the relationship between Pierrot and Columbine wrong, but I don't suppose it matters in a land where romance is defined by the immortal phrase 'Brace yourself, Sheila.')